Win XP Sp2, Dell 4100, HD 200gb. Bios boot order HD,CD,Floppy. After receiving msg.."Invalid Boot Diskette", "Insert Boot Diskette in A:" Ctrl-Alt-Del now boots system from C: This as a result of a motherboard failure and rebuild of C:
View 10 RepliesI recently installed a new hard drive into a friends computer and installed XP Home.
I ran all the updates and service packs.
I left later that day and let him install all his applications.
I got a call tonight from him saying he really screwed up and doesn't know what to do.
I had to follow his thinking over the phone so I hope I get this all correct.
He had trouble loading the drivers for his HP printer. He would get an error saying that a C: empHP_WebRelease folder was missing. He did manage to figure out that for some reason when I installed XP it called the Boot drive "I" instead of "C"
Can anyone throw any light on my computers startup problems? 1.6Athlon 512mg 20gig HDD rock?motherboard running legit XP Home with SP2. HDD less than half full, defrag shows not necessary.The computer starts ok but at some point in the process, it varies, it will freeze/lock and will not unlock and has to be rebooted, which in itself may not happen at the first or even second attempt. This gosz on about four times, freezing at different points, and can even be
after I have successfully used the computer for 5 or 10 minutes. Eventually it will boot up and run without a problem.
Was wondering is there a way for me to know if someone has used a PC, or not, within the last month. Is there a Login Log, or PC activity Log in XP?
View 4 Replies View RelatedComputer blue screens with no specific error msg and everytime i try to do pretty much anything with safe mode regular mode last known good configurations but here is it blue screens off of two different windows xp pro install cds. I ran several of their debugin tests that came up clean although there was an error about the cpu fan speed. The tech support guy said that i need to wipe the hard drive. I have tried booting with only one of the two ram chips and that didn't help at all.
View 10 Replies View RelatedFrequently when I right click anything, and occassionally when I select items for the start menu on my windows XP pro machine, the installation process for a program I already have installed wil begin - it must be manually cancelled (some times 2 or three times) before the originally requested response is given. At first it was Norton Anti Virus which attempted to install. More recently, Contribute seems to be the favorite. (Both are already installed).
View 4 Replies View RelatedI have a win 2003 dedicated server. My datacenter person has sent given report. I would like to know what indicates the report.
View 1 Replies View RelatedNorton keeps telling me that several programs are atempting to access the internet. How do I delete them?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI dislike MS but I would really like to know where to go in IE to fix its's linking to Adobe Reader 7.
View 3 Replies View RelatedOk, new scan with updated hijackthis. Hopefully I will get an answer now using the new verion.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have an old HD From a system that I got rid of. I want to put it into a friends system to see if I can retrieve the files off of it and put it onto my external HD. The hard drive was the boot disk and the computer I am installing it on has it's own boot disk. If I boot up with two boot disks will there be a problem? Is there anything I need to take into account before doing this? I am planning on installing the old HD onto an ATA cable that I unplugged from the DVD drive. The HD that is in this system is not on an ATA cable, I'm not sure what it is connected to, just a small plug with a blue cable going to the mother board.
View 3 Replies View RelatedAfter running Adaware, I keep getting browser hijack attempts even though I'm not surfing to questionable sites. I ran hijack this and here is the report.
View 3 Replies View RelatedMy laptop is running very slow and has been showing signs of hijacks. I have run Ad Aware and also Avast Virus Checker. I have Avast and AVG, Spyguard, Zone Alarm running and on my other machine running the same programs have no problems.
View 13 Replies View RelatedI am try to two partition drive C and drive D in my computer but only one c or d instoling. i have 4000mb hardrive,please tell me how can i instol partition in my window xp professional.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI have a dual boot system (2 hard drives) booting Suse and XP and boot up through Suse's built in boot manager which gives me the option of booting to Windows or Linux. But since I barely ever use Linux I want to delete it off the 2nd drive so I can use it for a storage drive, so I'm wondering how to replace the Windows Master Boot Record so I can just boot into my XP drive. I'm scared that once I delete/reformat the contents of the 2nd hard drive (I'll probably use Partition Magic to do this through my XP drive) that I won't be able to boot XP up anymore. So before I do anything I want to just be able to boot into XP and bypass the linux drive before I delete it to make sure everything is ok.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have a HP ze5568cl laptop (Windows XP SP2). For a few years we've had trouble with the power connector. We've just wiggled the power cable to keep it connected and lived with the problem. It also gets very hot and the fan runs constantly. Yesterday when I powered it on there was no power, absolutely nothing. My husband has some electronic knowledge so we took the laptop apart and he soldered the loose part of the power connector. While he was doing that I cleaned the fan (couldn't believe how much dust was in there.When we plugged in the power cable the orange light came on so we were excited. When we powered it on all the keyboard lights lit up so we thought we had fixed the problem but.that's all it did. It went no further except that the fan kicked on.There is a clicking noise coming from the cd drive about every second with the green light flashing. I suppose it is checking to see if there is a bootable cd in the cd drive. I have attempted to change the boot order by holding F1, then F2 but it still continues to try to read the cd drive. I can't get to the screen that will allow me to change the boot order.
I also put the OS disk in the cd drive, hoping that it would start with the disk but it just clicks. Hubby removed the cover of the cd drive and I could see that the cd is spinning.There were no problems with this laptop prior to the power problem. It was really working very well especially considering the age of it.
The information in my sig is not for the computer with the problem. It's actually for an old computer which my son now has at college.
I bought a computer for my wife and kids. Well months go by and my wife tries to install something and notices that the MAIN drive is H: not C:
I figured that it was weird but no big deal. Well I purchased a printer for her and while trying to install the software it was giving me a "Windows - No Disk in Drive" error.
I did some research and spoke to HP tech support and they suggested that I search the web for a way to change the drive letters from H: (current hard drive) to C: (supposed to be default drive)
I had a drive that was beginnning to squeal and i figured I could disable my drives one at a time to see which one was squealing. Of course, disabling the drives through the control panel doesn't actually keep them from spinning, so the whole thing was an exercise in boneheaded stupidity. Anyway, as soon as I disabled the c: drive the screen went blank (of course), and now when i try to reboot it complains about a non-system drive and asks me to insert a system disk. did I mention that this is a home-built system and it doesn't have a floppy, so i can't boot off the floppy? I tried booting off the XP install CD, but it won't except that either (this seems odd to me).
View 1 Replies View RelatedI installed a Serial ATA hard drive. Booted from floppy,partitioned and formatted 120mb HD,with 2 partitions.
Connected my old IDE drive and booted from Norton Ghostdisc, cloned my old drive to the new one. Removed all drives and USB card readers except the new SATA drive. Windows will not fully boot, it halts at the blue Windows intro screen. Restarted Windows, and scandisk ran, but indicated drive letter "H" not "C", so I guess the windows installation is still looking in the original place for it's files, ie. the "C" drive, that's why it won't boot. You cannot change the "System" drive letter from "Computer Management" within XP, and I cannot get into Windows anyway. Is there a "work around" for this, other than a clean install? Even then, is it still going to be drive "H"? And that means another Windows activation. How many goes do you get for activation? I tried a windows repair installation, and reactivation (wasted). Windows then worked, sort of. Lots of things were missing and programs unuseable,as they were looking for their files on "C": so I went back to square 1, put my old drive back in for the moment
I recently downloaded a service pack for XP, but when I re-started the computer, it got stuck in the middle of the re-boot, tried several times to start it with no success and after a while it just gave me an error message saying that the attempts at rebooting had failed.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI have a dual boot system with both having windows xp.When I load into the 1st XP installation, the following is the list and assignment of the drives:
C : Local Disk (contains the 1st XP installation)
D : CD Drive
E : Local Disk (contains data and also few installed program folders)
F : Local Disk (contains the 2nd XP installation)
Initially when I noticed this drive arrangement after setting up the dual boot, I just left it as is, not knowing what to do.But nowadays I am having a lot of problems as the installed programs are not accessible because their target location keeps changing, everytime I keep switching between the two operating systems.How can I solve this problem?Can I do the follwing : Load into the 1st XP installation, and then change the drive letters (of the last three drives) such that they are matching the drive assignment as seen when loading into the 2nd XP installation.Here in a way I have kept the same drive name for both installations.But Will this work?I also have some of the program folders for the 1st xp installation stored in E drive, and after changing it to D drive, will all the links be properly converted upon restart?
I have successfully cloned my primary c partition of a dual boot system with XP Pro on the 1st primary partition c: and XP Pro on the 2nd primary partition as d: I can boot into my XP on the c: drive with no problem, but when I attempt to boot into my XP on the D drive it hangs on the blue screen right before booting into the user profiles. And believe it or not it continuously loops making the windows startup sound and the shutdown sound. It does the same in safe mode. I will try to explain the process on what I did so it can help you experts figure out this dilemma that I'm having. My old drive an IDE 100GB IBM primary drive was partitioned into 3 parts:
c: 30GB FAT32 primary
d: 30GB FAT32 "
e: 30gb FAT32 "
All ran great in XP's on c: ,D: and :e except that i was running out of room in all the partitions and the drive is getting very old , I think (5yrs). I used XXClone Pro v.0.58.0 to clone my old c: and d: partitions to a WD IDE 160GB. I tried many other cloning proggys like Acronis True Image, Drive Clone, Paragon Drive Copy, Drive Image 2002, HDClone 3.1 Pro but they all either changed my new drive NTFS file system to FAT32 or made exact same size copies. I formatted and partitioned my new drive as follows:..............
I had voltage fluctuations last night due a snowstorm and the voltage dropped crashing my PC.It now won't boot and gives the error that a file is corrupted.Windows/system32/config..The PC runs an OEM XP home edition on a SATA drive, the PC also has an IDE drive (D) but the OSes are on the C drive.Inside the XP installation I have Linux Mint installed.When I boot I get the 2 options I always used to , XP (default) and Linux Mint.XP won't boot when selected and gives the error above.The Linux Mint, also on C and in fact installed as a program within XP, will boot, hence I believe the SATA drive to be undamaged.I can see the C drive and all the XP files from the Linux installation.I've tried using the original full CD and the recovery console but when the recovery console opens all it can see is the IDE drive which it labels D (and of course doesn't contain the original XP install.I can't remember how I got XP on the SATA drive in the first place, I don't appear to have any Hard drive drivers in the case I keep all software CDs in and I'm a bit flummoxed. I can only imagine I just fitted it and loaded the XP install disc but that's at odds with what seems to be happening now.Spent a large part of today Googling but can't find anything that will fix this. so far.I don't want to have to wipe and re-install everything unless there's no option, it's a fast way to kill a couple of days over the holidays.
View 8 Replies View RelatedI'm running Windows XP and want to migrate to another hard drive. I used the excellent open source utility CloneZilla to clone my hard drive to the new drive, and used the equally excellent EASEUS Partition Master to resize the cloned partition to fill the new drive. Next I edited boot.ini on my original Windows to add the cloned drive as another boot option. After a bit of trial and error guessing the disk path for boot.ini I was able to dual boot into the original or the clone.
Now I want to boot off the new drive directly without dual booting off the original drive as I intend to wipe the old drive after I am satisfied that everything is working OK. But here's the catch: the original drive is SATA, while the new drive is IDE. So I can't simply swap the cables around and be done with it. So I configured the boot sequence in the bios to use "HDD-0" instead of "SCSI" (for some reason this old BIOS thinks SATA is SCSI) and restart. The system gets as far as detecting the boot source (floppy first, then CD-ROM) and then stops. No "operating system not found" or any other kind of error, just a blinking cursor and no activity.
I get exactly the same behavior using "HDD-1" to "HDD-3" as the boot drive in the bios. The bios detects the drive itself OK. I have also edited boot.ini on the new drive to point to the same location I used to add it to the dual boot menu on the original drive, but that didn't help. I also booted off the Windows installer, went into Recovery mode and ran Fixmbr and Fixboot with the original SATA drive unplugged and without specifying a device name.
I'am using xp with service pack 2 i am using p4 2.8 ghz with 1024 ram maxtor 80gb hdd when i start my pc the logon screen does not show up if there is a cd/dvd on my dvd drive if i remove the dvd then restart then it's fine
View 12 Replies View Relatedi have 1 250G HD with three partitions, C: is only 5G and is only for OS but whenever i try to install something from a CD it automaticlly attempts to install in C:, what do i have to do to get it to install on a different partition?
View 5 Replies View Relatedi want my pc to boot off my dvd or E: drive
when i go to the boot sequence it says that it is booting off of the D: drive, which cant read dvds, and i dont know how to add drives to the boot sequence
i need i to boot off the dvd drive because i have linux on a dvd and need to boot it, then partition my hdd, then install the actual OS.
For whatever reasons I cannot set the BIOS so that the computer boots from the CD.What I did was:
1) Select the boot menu
2) Select the CR ROM device ( which shows in white letters )
3) Press ENTER,now it indicates : 1. 1st Master : SONY DVD
4) Press F-10,then it is asking for save configuration
5) Select yes and press ENTER
The problem is that when I start the computer it does not boot from the CD.Can anybody tell me how it is done ?
I just upgraded to a 300GB hard drive from a 250, which I will use as a backup drive. However, when I set it up, the primary boot partition got set up as D:. I have 5 partitions on this drive. The others were also mislabeled, but I could change them with the Computer Management tool. There is no C drive on this system. I want to make what is now D become C.The original also had 5 partitions. All I wanted to do is duplicate the old drive to the new one. Somehow, the boot partition became D and I can't change it from within Windows. Is there a way to do that? I have created the UBD for Windows using Bart's PE, so I can boot the machine independently of using the hard drive. If I can use that, is there a tool there or a command line program I can use to change it?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI recently purchased a new hard drive and used the software that came with it to set up the new drive as the boot drive and the old drive as the slave. However after installation, it still shows the old drive as the boot drive and the new drive as the slave.I have set the jumpers to "master" on the new drive and slave on the old drive. Is there any way to change this? I dont know what else to do siince the jumpers are set correctly. running winXP home with Dell Pentium 4.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI am having problmes booting my laptop. Normally for my desktop I'd just pop in the CD and boot from disk, but with this computer it isn't that simple.
My computer: Sony Vaio VGN-x505ZP
My OS: Windows XP Pro
The Problem: When I restarted my computer at one point (after trying to clean off some spyware) it told me a file was missing or corrupt: <windows root>system32hal.dll