I apologize that I'm not a user that logs on very often. I've been doing this close to 30 years now, I just haven't kept up with newer tech.
I have an old Compaq with XP Pro installed and a new WD 250GB drive which was working fine. In the past 3 weeks or so, the machine has blue screened out when left for a long while, but would recover with a reboot. I need the use of this machine ASAP.
Same thing happened today, I rebooted and this time was told the drive was missing windows\system32\hal.dll. I created a new boot floppy from my XP laptop which essentially seems to be Win Me, that I understand doesn't recognize NTFS. I ran Norton from CD, but that seems to tap into a latent and older version of Windows on my scrap slave HD on the other IDE channel. No ability to access the new HD, I can't get Windows or DOS to see it.
Now, the BIOS recognizes the drive ID, but the drive won't boot. Wants that hal.dll at a DOS prompt. My impression is that the drive isn't really spinning up, but as I said, it is recognized by the BIOS, so I don't know if that means it can read a chip on the drive for ID even if the drive won't spin. Tried another cable, and a different power connector, with no better results.
The last ditch is to get a boot disk that will show the 250GB HD, so that I can copy hal.dll to the drive. Although I'm skeptical this will work anyway,the HD is only 2 months old, and I can't think of why this problem with damaged files should have developed anyway.
If this isn't the right forum, please let me know a more visible place to post this question.
Thank you so much,
ATF :o