hard drive crashed... windows wont boot

[David.Seth2]

So I have 2 western digital drives and 2 maxtor drives. The older maxtor just went out (surprise), so I rebooted and sure enough, the drive wasnt listed in My Computer. So I unplugged the drive and took it out, but when I rebooted the pc it said that a windows file was missing and that I had to install it. This didn't make sense because the maxtor drive was just used for games, and my OS was installed on one of the WD drives (which is still fine). This has happened to me before, when one drive fails it prevents windows to boot up (despite windows being installed on a good drive). What causes this? And is there a way to prevent this? I tried googling this but i didn't find to much that was helpful. Has anyone here come across this?

 

[huntingbear]

what files does it say is missing?

ntdlr? something like that?

 

[VirusType2]

I think the only thing it would put on that drive is a page file - if you set it to use one - and a recycler, I would think for that drive only.

It doesn't make sense to me, sorry. Maybe your took out the wrong drive? Meh - let us know what you figure out.

 

[David.Seth2]

It doesn't make sense to me, sorry. Maybe your took out the wrong drive?

I thought this at first, but i double checked and i took out the right drive which did not have windows. It doesnt matter now anyway cause I already reformatted. But this is the second time Ive had to do this. A drive fails and prevents me from booting up no matter what I do. eh, oh well.

edit: it was a hal.dll file btw

 

[VirusType2]

hal.dll? oh, I had that problem when I tried putting xp on an old computer with 2 pentium III chips. The bios only supported 9GB hard drives and shit. Worthless. Sometimes windows would boot, sometimes I could put the disc in and repair the missing file/s, but 95% of the time it wouldn't boot into windows. Shit was strange.

 

[xcellerate]

go to your bios and make sure the removed hard drive isn't listed anywhere.

 

[Asus]

Make sure your bios isn't still looking for the drive. If you are using IDE drives then you might be dealing with Master/Slave settings and if one is Slave then your board may still be looking for the one set as Master which isn't there.

You could try to boot up into recovery mode (may need CD) and try the command fixmbr (fix Master Boot Record).

 

[huntingbear]

hal.dll? all you need to do is copy it from another copy of XP to that drives system32 folder

 

[David.Seth2]

when the drive was unplugged, the bios didnt see it, so no problem there.

hal.dll? all you need to do is copy it from another copy of XP to that drives system32 folder

how do you do that if you dont have dos?

 

[VirusType2]

I think I put the Xp disc in the drive during boot and selected repair. Note that some XP discs can only install from within a Windows environment and some can only install from boot up.

 

[huntingbear]

when the drive was unplugged, the bios didnt see it, so no problem there.



how do you do that if you dont have dos?

borrow a friends computer, plug drive in, boot into your friends OS then drag and drop their hal.dll file from their \system32 folder to yours on your drive and BINGO!

 

[David.Seth2]

borrow a friends computer, plug drive in, boot into your friends OS then drag and drop their hal.dll file from their \system32 folder to yours on your drive and BINGO!

Oy that sounds like hassle, but thanks for the info. I'll just stick with re-installing windows. I have a drive dedicated for just windows, so it doesnt take a while to get things running again. About an hour or 2.