Hi Everyone.
I'm brand new here, I have bought a used, refurbished GX150 I found on Ebay to replace my daughters dead comp, It came without an operating system.
My plan was to put the HDD from her old comp in it and she would be good to go!
When I put the HDD in it gave me, error loading O/S message? I then tried to boot from the CD (Win XP) The boot sequence only gives me 2 options, 1. Normal and 2. Hard drive? If I go to the setup screen it shows CDROM (Not installed).
I put the HDD in my other daughters comp and made a boot diskette, When I tried that I get, Missing or corrupt file, windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
I've tried all this with 2 different HDD's with XP already installed and also with the blank HDD that came with the comp?
Does anyone know what else I can do? or have I bought a dead computer?
Thanx... Mark...
If the computer completes POST then it is not dead. It sounds like you may have a problem with the CD drive rather than the hard drive. You can't take a hard drive with Win XP installed from one computer and install it in another computer unless they have nearly identical configurations. The error message you received has to do with the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) which must be correctly configured for the system the software is running on. Check the BIOS to make sure the CD Drive is detected. If the CD is not detected in the BIOS, make sure the Secondary IDE channel is enabled in the BIOS. You may have separate entries for the Primary IDE and Secondary IDE channels or you may have one option for the IDE chanels that should have "BOTH" selected. If the Secondary IDE channel (or BOTH) is enabled and the CD drive is still not detected, make sure the IDE cable is properly connected to the CD Dirve and the motherboard Secondary IDE connector. Also make sure the 4-pin power cable is connected to the CD drive and the CD drive jumper is set to MASTER. If the BIOS still does not detect the CD Drive then you may have a bad drive or cable or IDE channel on the motherboard. You can also connect the CD Drive to the same cable as the hard drive, but set the CD Drive jumper to Slave if you do and make sure the hard drive jumper is set to master. On some of the newer Dells , you can access the boot device selection menu by pressing the F12 key just after the Dell logo is displayed on monitor.
Thanx Buggz! I don't know why I didnt think of that? I hooked it up Master/Slave with the HDD as Master and CD as slave and it worked, but I kept getting a disk read error while installing XP. So I changed it around to CD as Master and HDD as slave and it worked just fine :).
When It finished installing I went looked in My computer and the other cd drive is there also..
Thanx again... Mark
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