[tomatojay]

well first let me give a little background to the recent problem i'm having.

i had a customer bring in their computer because they can't get it to burn cd's. after looking at the bios and windows and whatnot i noticed everything detected the drive. i tried uninstalling the drivers and restarting, so windows can reinstall them. didn't do anything. i tried uninstalling the whole device and rebooted. again nothing. it was odd according to windows everything was fine. the one thing i did notice though was the computer was loaded with viruses and sypware.

so i told the customer it looks lik eit might be some viruses messing with system files and i'd have to clean them out to find out. well i cleaned out everything, and now still nothing. the drive just won't even see a cd at all. i went in and unplugged the hard drive and set the bios to boot only form the cd and put in ERD. nothing happened. so my assumption is the drive is shot. it spins, but doesn't load anything. i'm guessing the laser is dead.

but that's not the problem i'm having now...

so as i'm waiting to hear from the customer about replacing the drive i went in and was cleaning a little more junk files they had. something i noticed was they partitioned a 40gb hd to c:\ 4gbs and d:\ 35gbs. i would assume they did this because they installed XP pro on the 4 gb. BUT they left the copy of XP home on the d drive. so now there is XP pro on c:\ and XP home on d:\.

So i went into the system properities and shut off the boot option. The computer would ask you which windows to boot from. defaulting to the top option. all i did was turn of the wait 30 seconds before booting.

now the computer windows can't start because the hal.dll file is missing.

problem is i can't use a windows cd to boot to and replace it cause the cd drive doesn't work.

HELP please. lol this sucks.

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tomatojay...

That's quite a pickle, alright. Got another cd-rom laying around? Might be time to add an extra drive to the tool kit...they are inexpensive and can really save your bacon sometimes.

wannabe1

[wannabe1]

tomatojay...

That's quite a pickle, alright. Got another cd-rom laying around? Might be time to add an extra drive to the tool kit...they are inexpensive and can really save your bacon sometimes.

wannabe1

[yardguard]

Use a dos startup disk and go to the c drive and edit the boot.ini file...

You may have to get rid of the read only and hidden attribute before doing this.

Just put a timeout value back in it and see if it works..



Just a thought.

[tomatojay]

yea i know it would be nice to have one, but i work in a store that i can't just open anything i want. i'm thinking of just telling the customer they need a new drive and then fixing the problem then. only problem is if they say no and they want to come get the computer...it's not working.

[dsenette]

when the computer was booting correctly....was it booting to home or pro?....with what you describe..it seems like they installed home on the second partition..possibly because the pro install wasn't working

[tomatojay]

well home was what came on the computer, but it was booting to pro. they probably just wanted to upgrade, but didn't. they just made a new partitiaon instead.

[tomatojay]

ok interesting...i got the win xp quick boot files from bootdisc.com


starting the computer with that disk i get errors for the himen.sys and cd1.sys files.

also i can't change the drive. it's only on a:\.

says every other drive is invalad.

what's up with that?

[dsenette]

you need to either use an open xp disk or get their xp disk and try a couple of things

#1 boot to the recovery console and do an sfc /scannow

#2 try a repair install of windows

[dsenette]

you could also use the UBCD4WIN to get to the boot.ini if you cant get to it from dos

[tomatojay]

ok well i guess i'm going to have to bite the bullet here on this one.

all that is fine and dandy, only thing is they require a working cd drive. which this computer doesn't have. i'm just hoping the customer doesn't flip out when i tell them they ahve to pay for virus/spyware cleaning, AND now cd drive. then after all that i still have to fix the computer.

[dsenette]

well........i can't tell you how to run your business...but...it sounds like the cd drive would at least read cd's before they brought it to you....so....technically you broke it....it just wouldn't burn...i'd burn your shop down if you charged me to fix something that at least partially worked before you touched it

[tomatojay]

no that's the thing. it didn't read before i got it. it didn't work at all. it was seen by windows and the bios, but would not do anything at all. i'm not that incompetent.

[yardguard]

LMAO @ dsenette

[tomatojay]

ok then. well peace. i don't need to be insulted when i'm asking for help.

[not_napster]

Well there is probably some other computer that someone had given you to repair that has a working cd drive . Pull it out and use it temp on the computer with the dead cd drive.
Or if you have access to a usb hard disk you could run an OS off it.

CD drives are very very cheap nowadays. Probably $10 if you buy it secondhand. And if you regularly deal with repairing computers hardware/software you should consider getting one for yourself or rather ask your employer to provide you with one citing your present situation. It saves a lot of trouble and tension.

Let us know how it turns out.

cheers

not_napster