Trying to install a drive; failing miserably

I have been trying to install a new drive in my unit.

The original drive that was a gift last year went ka-ka after nine months. The warranty replacement went ka-ka after two months. The newest warranty replacement won't install. All were Maxtor drives.

The original drive was a 120G and the replacements were upgrades to 160G. I had no trouble with installing any of the drives until now.

When I tried to install the newest Maxtor 160G drive it gave the message "Remove disks or other media; hit any key to restart". There were no disks in the unit. All that happened when I hit the "any key" was a perpetual loop of the same message.

soooooooo ... I tried installing a Seagate 160G drive instead. This went smoothly but when it was finished the second partition had not mirrored and I had no recovery partition nor recover capability.

Not having sense enough to leave well enough alone, I called Seagate and they told me that I would have to repartition the drive with two partitions and then run the install program again. I would then have to do a file copy of the second partition; but that might not work.

soooooooo ... I repartitioned the drive -- which used to boot -- and ran the installation program again -- and again -- and again each time getting the message that the file c:\windows\system32\hal.dll was either corrupt or missing and to install a fresh copy of this file.

soooooooo ... I went to the original system restore disk set and found the file hal.dll and copied it to the appropriate directory. Same message.

soooooooo ... I then reinstalled the original Maxtor 160G and said to myself "Self, you have been doing this all wrong. You need to boot from a CD with MaxBlast 4.0 instead of from the C: drive." Sheer genius!

soooooooo ... I downloaded the MaxBlast 4.0 .iso file from Maxtor.com and burned a CD. I then booted from the CD and everything went absolutely swimingly. The partitions and recovery files were there and everything looked as though all was right with the universe -- until I installed the new drive as the new boot drive.

There was that damned "file c:\windows\system32\hal.dll corrupt or missing" message that I got on the Seagate drive.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Any help out there for this misbegotten soul?

 

Have a look here jimpeel
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;320252 :cool

 

Toke,

The article seems to apply to those who are starting with a new drive out of the box and an over-the-counter copy of XP. I am trying to mirror the existing drive onto the new drive.

I have done this several times with great success but this time it simply s---s on me.

All I have in the way of "installation" disks is the system restore disk set that I made from the computer when I got it. The problem with using them is that they -- even with a non-destructive restore -- send the computer back to the dark ages before SP1 and SP2 and it also puts all of the screwed up software back on that came with it; like Wild Tangent, etc.

Is there any way around this?

I found this article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305595/ which seemed to address my problem but when I searched the hard drive for a copy of boot.ini, none was found. I searched all files including system and hidden files to no avail. I didn't find one on the restore discs either.

 

Hmmmm. Looks like everyone has run into the same brick wall I have. I guess I'll just go ahead and do the system recovery and, still one more time, delete all of the extraneous crap and get the updates from MS.

I sure wish that there was some way to get the latest installed software from HP but I have asked and they say that I can only get the software that takes me back to 2003.

<sigh>

Thanks for the help, Toke. Wish I had a real copy of XP because if I did I wouldn't be going through all of this.