[Psycho_chick]

Hi

i have recently encountered a series of erros when booting up Windows XP on my pc. A couple of days ago, i got an "cannot load netldr"
error message. It refused to boot into windows and kept asking me to restart. Everytime i did, i got the error. I tried to get into safe mode, but could not.

I got some advice to get an xp cd and to boot into the recovery console,and copy the netldr and ntdetect.com files to the drive i had my OS installed on.
I have two physical hard drives. One is partioned into two logical drives (C and D) and the other is set as my drive E.

Drive C is where i have the windows installation. However, I was able to boot into the console, when i noticed the prompt said D:\ windows>. I was able to browse the drive using the dir command, and realised that my second hard drive originally set to E:\ had now been changed to c:\. My other hard drive, where Win XP is installed (and orinigally set to c: and d:) had now become D:\ and E:\.

I copied the two files to the d: drive and tried agin to boot, but the got an error about "invalid BOOT.ini" and missing or corrupt hal.dll.

I realised that perhaps it was looking for the windows files on the c: drive, and they were now on d:\... so i opened up my pc and unplugged my second hrad drive. And was able to boot up properly.

How could this have happened? Does anyone know why the drive letters may have changed??

also, i don't know if this is related but i recently installed a new HP printer on my pc, and noticed that whenever i tried to shut down my pc, i get a message that the HP software is not responding. a couple of days before i got the boot errors, i thought i shut down my pc but a couple of hours later i realised it was still on. And the message about the
unresponding HP sopftware was on the screen. When i chose the end now option, the screen went blank (no desktop items, no taskbar, just the backdrop) as if the pc was shutting down, but then froze on that screen, and i had to manually shut it down by holding down the power button.

Any help that i can get with this will be greatly appreciated

Thanks!