thaman092

I have an Acer Aspire 5000 running XP Home. I reied to download and install Photoshop CS4 and the keygen turned out to be a trojan. Now, when I try to boot, I get the following:

I have tried to use my system recovery disks to no avail. Whenever I attempt to use them, I am told that the recovery was successful within only a few seconds of inserting the disk. Please help...

keeganaddie1

Same, exact problem. Please help. Thank you.

T J Belfiore

Please, both of you - Put your Windows XP disc into your disc drive and refer to this guide.

T J Belfiore

Also, Welcome to the wonderful world of TSF!

keeganaddie1

&

thaman092

CCT

Great care and consideration should be taken when 'downloading' software.

Quite often the 'deal' is a 'steal'!

In any case, a method of recovery is to perform a Repair Install BUT when the F6 p[rompt comes up, press F5.

This will bring up a (small) HAL interface - choose the right one for your comp (it scrolls) and select it, then proceed (after proceeding the F6 will appear again as normal).

Dunedin

Hello both,

If you only have recovery disks and no proper XP installation CD, try to borrow one to run the repair

Here is another method which should fix the problem

Configure your PC to boot from CD if it isn't already set up that way. You may need to enter the BIOS to configure the PC to boot from the CD.
Set the boot order to
Floppy (if present)
CDROM
Hard Disk
SAVE and EXIT

Start your PC with the XP Setup CD in the drive. When you see the "Press any key to boot from CD..." prompt, do so and let the CD-based boot process begin.

When the Recovery Console option is offered ("Press R to start the Recovery Console"), do so. You may be asked which Windows installation to enter, in which case type the number of the Windows installation you wish to work on (usually "1").

When prompted, enter the Administrator's password for that Windows installation. If you did not set a password just press ENTER

At the command prompt, type
Bootcfg /Rebuild
ENTER

The exact wording will depend on your setup, but after a few moments you'll see a prompt that says something like:
Total Identified Windows Installs: 1
[1] C:\Windows
Add Installation To Boot List?

Assuming the information you see is correct, enter
Y
Bootcfg will start the process of rebuilding the boot list to include the indicated Windows installation

After a moment, you'll be asked to "Enter Load Identifier."
This is the name of the operating system that will appear in boot menus.
Type
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
or
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
(whichever your system is)
ENTER
Next you'll be asked to "Enter OS Load Options."
For normal installations, enter
/Fastdetect
ENTER

Type
Exit
to leave the Recovery Console and reboot the PC, which should then start normally.

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tonglu1

Hello, I am new but I am also having a serious problem which has been discussed in this forum. I have followed the steps Dunedin posted on 04-30-2009, 09:40 AM. I am glad to report that I'm no longer stuck at the error message of missing or corrupt hal.dll file and my computer boots to the screen where it says "Windows XP Professional starting".

However, without actually booting to the desktop, it turned right around and showed Windows "logging off", and then before this is done, it seems to get into an infinite loop of some sort (with logging in and logging off tunes played one immediately after the other) unable to decide which way it was going, on or off? I had to turn the power switch off to shut it down. Could someone help please? Thanks.

Tong

Blade_Jones

If it's still rebooting then that is a bad sign. I think you'll have to recover your data and reinstall Windows, but wait to see what the others have to say.
Additional causes may be a physically damaged hard drive. You might run the command prompt command: Chkdsk
Also make sure you correctly rewrote the Boot.ini file (when you ran the Bootcfg /Rebuild command) by typing in the command prompt: bootcfg /list
Hopefully it says something like...
[1] Microsoft Windows Whistler Professional
Operating System Load Options: /fastdetect
Operating System Location: D:\Windows

[2] Microsoft Windows Whistler Server
Operating System Load Options: /fastdetect
Operating System Location: C:\Windows

tonglu1

I ran chkdsk and it says that "The volume appears to be in good condition and was not checked"... I did ran chkdsk last night and it was all right.

I ran bootcfg /list. The result was:
[1] Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Operating System Load Options: /fastdetect
Operating System Location: C:\Windows

However, when I boot my system using a Windows XP bootable diskette (created with Easeus' Partition Manager), it said that there were 2 errors:

1) Partition 1 on harddisk3 start head is 1. The right start head is 0.

2) Partition 1 on harddisk3 total sector is 163846872. The right total sectors is 1?3846935. (I am pretty sure the missing digit is also 6 except it was covered by a non-movable mouse pointer figure).

From item 2 above, the difference between the two sector number count is 63. I noticed that when I restored my partition last night (using Drive Image 7) it had a flash up note while I moved the mouse over the partition entry for target restore location that it had an offset of 63 sectors. So, the above error statement seems to corroborate with the offset number which Drive image found earlier.

The Partition Manager boot program did offer to fix the 2 "errors". But, I did not let it do the fixes because I wanted to check the bootcfg /list first and further, I did not see any way to undo it in case it was wrong. I could always re-run their boot disk though and do the fix.

So, should I fix those known "Errors" as found by Partition Manager?

Thanks for your help.

Tong

Blade_Jones

I'm not really sure what all that means if harddisk3 is your floppy disc? You still need to be able to boot from the new repair install installation. You could try booting from an Ubuntu Live CD, but if successful all that tells you is that the other hardware is likely working fine. It appears as though you have a software problem or a hard drive problem.

Looks like the Boot.ini file was written correctly. You could try runing chkdsk from the command prompt then redoing the repair install to insure that none of that repair install data was written to bad sectors on your drive. Actually Windows MAY verify that data is written correctly during repair installs anyway - I'm not sure. I doubt a chkdisk and 2nd repair install will work. Probably need to reinstall Windows. Sometimes repair installs don't work. Again wait and see if anyone else has any sophisticated insight to fixing this.

Dunedin

Here is a fix for the log on/log off loop

See my Post #3
Problem with Loging on to profile

Or this
http://thinkinginpixels.com/quick-fi...nlog-off-loop/

These are the only ways to fix this other than a reinstall of XP.

.

tonglu1

I have created a BartPE CD and booted my computer as suggested in http://windowsxp.mvps.org/peboot.htm.

However, on step 5 of Verifying and fixing the Userinit value in the registry, I got an error message:

Load Hive
"Cannot Load X:\I386\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE. Access is denied."

What should I do? Please advise. Thanks.

Tong

Blade_Jones

I would have used the "Ubuntu method" instead of that BartPE method.

Dunedin

Try using C

.

tonglu1

Thank you, Dunedin, for seeing the error. Shortly after my last post, I also realized that it must be wrong to use X-drive.

Nevertheless, when I navigated to C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\, I found there was no subdirectory or file in that window. I don't know why. My suspicion is that directory has been corrupted.

Looking at my records, I have found an earlier backup (i.e. a drive image) which was written on 10/28. I did a restore of that image. After that my computer was able to boot to desktop and so far it seems to function properly.

So, even though I have lost a whole week's data, I am glad that at least my computer is back working again.

Thank you all, my friends, for your kind help.

Tong

pccare_himanshu

For this issue kind of issue refer Microsoft KB

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945380

Dunedin

You are very welcome tonglu1


pccare_himanshu
We fixed the "hal" problem a couple of days ago

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