PCTech Forums

i installed xp pro onto a new hard drive up to the part where it needs to restart. when it restarted i got the "windows could not restart.......hal.dll"
i tried to do the " expand d:\i386..." got file could not be expanded". I tried to reformat the drive again. Now I get " a disk read error has occured". I starting to think that i have a very expensive paperweight now.
Any advice on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

HIBB,

I have a couple of question first.

Is this a brand new hard drive or just new to you?
How are you formatting the drive?

The hal dll might have to do with the hardware allocation layer. When you did the install, did you have perepherial devices hooked up like printers, scanners and faxes? This would really choke up an install.

This is not a new hard drive. it was previously a secondary drive used for storage in the same computer. i installed xp on a new hd but this drive was still connected when i did that so it was wiped. now i want to make it a back-up of my current OS. I formatted two ways. Once in the disk manager by right clicking my comp. the other time when actually installing xp.

i did have two external devices hooked up @ install. My MBOX and a midi interface. In a previous post i was trying to find a solution to a noise problem that i continue to have on my current working hd. i'm trying to start anew to see if it's a mobo problem or drivers or whatever.

Hibb

I see several problems here. When you install Windows to a system. Disconnect all hard drives except the one for the install. Remove all external peripherals to the system.

There are two reasons you have only one drive up and running. If you have a Dell and know nothing about cable select IDE cables, you will probably install to the wrong drive and wipe out your data. The second reason not to hook up the other drive, is that Windows will make sure that the second hard drives partition is no longer set to active. The second drive will no longer boot as a single.

If you get a Windows boot disk and run fdisk from the DOS prompt on the second drive, I think you will find that the partition is not set to active any more. From the FDISK menu you can do a 4 Display Partition Information. That will tell you if the drive has an active partition. If it doesn't then do a 2 to Set the Active partition. Then reboot the XP problem child and see if it completes the initial install.

in reading another post on obtaining a boot disk, it says to have 6 floppy disks ready. is it possible to make a boot cd instead? i don't have a floppy drive. when i initially put the drive in it said inactive on the disk manager so i'm sure that is the case. is there any other way to reset the partion to active?