Dear all,
Got a dilly of a problem. Trying to fix a pc for a friend. Running xp home SP1, it's a Dell. The system wouldn't boot into xp at all. I had an error, missing hal.dll file. After trying a thousand fixes, booting from recovery disk, etc...I figured out that the entire windows/system32 folder was non-existant. Couldn't find it al all.
I didn't want to risk losing any data for my friend, so I didn't want to reload windows from the recovery disk, so I made a copy of another system32 folder from a machine running xp, took the hard drive out of the pc, hooked it up to another pc using an external hard drive enclosure, and pasted the entire system32 folder into the affected hard drive.
I put the hard drive into the original pc and tried to boot it up.
First of all: the system32 folder that I copied must have included log on info from another user (the person who used the hard drive that I copied the folder from).
It booted up, but I was asked to fill in a password from this other user. I figured out the password, but then I realized the new system32 folder also didn't have all the drivers that the affected system needed. I then went through a series of prompts, where all the hardware (pci bus, usb drivers, cdrom, etc) needed to load the drivers. Almost all of them worked automatically, except the 56k modem and the ethernet card. Both of those installs asked for their original hardware installation disks, which I don't have.
In any event, I cancelled out of those installs, and I am now left at a blue screen with no text, start button, desktop, etc. If I hit ctrl+alt+del I get the Task Manager, but I can't do anything from there except reboot. I can boot in safe mode, but there I just get a black screen with "Safe Mode" in all four corners of the screen.
If anyone knows what to do, besides fdisk, I would appreciate any thoughts.
Many thanks!
LLPJ
Got a dilly of a problem. Trying to fix a pc for a friend. Running xp home SP1, it's a Dell. The system wouldn't boot into xp at all. I had an error, missing hal.dll file. After trying a thousand fixes, booting from recovery disk, etc...I figured out that the entire windows/system32 folder was non-existant. Couldn't find it al all.
I didn't want to risk losing any data for my friend, so I didn't want to reload windows from the recovery disk, so I made a copy of another system32 folder from a machine running xp, took the hard drive out of the pc, hooked it up to another pc using an external hard drive enclosure, and pasted the entire system32 folder into the affected hard drive.
I put the hard drive into the original pc and tried to boot it up.
First of all: the system32 folder that I copied must have included log on info from another user (the person who used the hard drive that I copied the folder from).
It booted up, but I was asked to fill in a password from this other user. I figured out the password, but then I realized the new system32 folder also didn't have all the drivers that the affected system needed. I then went through a series of prompts, where all the hardware (pci bus, usb drivers, cdrom, etc) needed to load the drivers. Almost all of them worked automatically, except the 56k modem and the ethernet card. Both of those installs asked for their original hardware installation disks, which I don't have.
In any event, I cancelled out of those installs, and I am now left at a blue screen with no text, start button, desktop, etc. If I hit ctrl+alt+del I get the Task Manager, but I can't do anything from there except reboot. I can boot in safe mode, but there I just get a black screen with "Safe Mode" in all four corners of the screen.
If anyone knows what to do, besides fdisk, I would appreciate any thoughts.
Many thanks!
LLPJ