[pitchharmonics]

Computer user was loading a video game(one of the tycoon type video games), yet computer freezed during installation and user performed a hard reboot. I started the computer and found the following:

The computer flashs blue screen with Stop 0x00000024 and reboots.
Press F8, try safe mode. Get to mup.sys and computer reboots.
Edited the boot.ini file to bring up recovery console option and try to enter the console but hal.dll is missing.
Used a bootable cd to look at the hard drive, and the program showed the original files and folders. The majority are damaged.
Tried a trial of Microsoft's ERD Commander and it cannot recognize the hard drive.



What to do....Any suggestions?

Edited by pitchharmonics, 06 January 2008 - 12:49 PM.

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Boot the Recovery Console and run chkdsk /r. See if that resolves the problem. Post back with results please.

[Ztruker]

Boot the Recovery Console and run chkdsk /r. See if that resolves the problem. Post back with results please.

[pitchharmonics]

I tried to run the recovery console but I kept getting an error, where hal.dll is missing or corrupt. Last night, I had some great luck.
What seemed to make a huge difference was running BartPE and doing a check disk, it also repaired sectors.
Before I used the Ultimate Boot CD to do a check disk. (Check disk with UBCD ran differently than check disk with BartPE).

The unusual part of all of this is after running check disk from BartPE, Windows is now stable and booting normally.

One other quandary though, this person has a HP computer that came installed with Vista, the user decided that they wanted to use there old operating system XP Professional and installed it. There seems to be no reminants of the original installed condition of the computer except for the blue HP screen and some folders in the program files that are empty that had been part of the original install. See...every time I try to push F11 to go to recovery console, nothing happens... I'm wondering if the bios needs something, maybe a flash. Any suggestions?

[Ztruker]

Depends on how they installed XP. If they did a clean install by deleting all partitions, then creating one large partition, there is no longer a Recovery option available via F11 since that partition was deleted.

Ask them exactly what they did. Only recourse there is to order the Recovery CDs from HP. They will contain Vista though, not XP. You could call their tech support or try their online tech chat and see what your options are.