Windows XP won't boot after power outage

[tjaco]

I have a home built system with an ASUS P4b266 Motherboard, 160 Gig Seagate Hard drive as main drive with Western Digital 60 Gig backup drive. Came home after a power outage and could not get computer to boot past the post test.

By changing the boot sequence to boot from the backup drive I was able to boot to windows and ran check disk on main drive as well as all the Seagate diagnostics from the Seagate web site. All tests show nothing wrong with the drive. I am able to view the drive contents in windows explorer and copy files from it to the backup drive.

I have tried using an XP boot disk but get an error message saying system 32 \hal.dll missing or corrupt. I tried copying the hal.dll from my good drive to the bad one but still get the same error. When I try booting from the Windows XP disk to do a repair install I also get error message saying the file system is too corrupt and the disk must be reformatted.

I have reached the conclusion that my answer is to buy a new hard drive do a clean install of Windows and transfer as much data as I need from the problem drive. At that point I can reformat the bad drive. Not looking forward to this as it will take a lot of time to reinstall everything so I'm just wondering if anyone has any other ideas to try. It seems strange that the drive checks out OK and I'm able to view it in Explorer.

Any and all ideas would be most appreciated.

 

[zephead]

if you use ntfs your file system would be able to find the file's fragments,m try a 3rd party software.

 

[tripkebab]

Umm why not just format your main drive????? You say you will need to buy another hard drive to transfer your data to from your main before you format.

Why not just boot up as you did before on your backup copy what you need over to the backup from the main, then reboot and format your main with a fresh install of windows.

If you still getting problems formatting with windows install you can fromat the drive using disk management when your booted up on your backup drive.

Theres no reason u shouls have to buy another hd. + if you havent got enough space on you backups to copy accross everything u want from your main just burn the remainder onto cd.

hope this helps =)

 

[tjaco]

if you use ntfs your file system would be able to find the file's fragments,m try a 3rd party software.

What should I be looking for? Disk recovery software? Do you have any recommendations for what would work best?

Thanks.

Umm why not just format your main drive????? You say you will need to buy another hard drive to transfer your data to from your main before you format.

Why not just boot up as you did before on your backup copy what you need over to the backup from the main, then reboot and format your main with a fresh install of windows.

If you still getting problems formatting with windows install you can fromat the drive using disk management when your booted up on your backup drive.

Theres no reason u shouls have to buy another hd. + if you havent got enough space on you backups to copy accross everything u want from your main just burn the remainder onto cd.

hope this helps =)

Yeah, I've considered that but I don't have a lot of room on the backup drive and the ITunes folder alone on the main drive is 12 gigs. With four people in the family using the computer I guess I'm a bit overwhelmed by the thought of trying to sort through the main drive to see what I need to keep and what I can get rid of. I have the same problem with my garage

 

[tripkebab]

well even if u got a new garage, err hardrive ud still need to sort through all ur **** that u wana copy accross.

But if u need an excuse to get a new hd its a good one

 

[zephead]

i had an ibm deskstar fail on me in the fall of 03 (2 days after the warranty expired) and i was able to download some stuff to help me got as many files as possible off the drive. i don't remember it's exact name, i either found it on simtel.net or went to google. you'll have to poke around. good luck