Notebook XP won't boot

My son (<brag> clinical assistant professor of oral medicine</brag>) has a Sony VAIO PCGK13 notebook that he has been using for about a half a year. He says that XP automatically updates itself. Yesterday it wouldn’t boot, giving a message to the effect that <root>/system32/hal.dll is missing or corrupted and should be reinstalled. He talked with Sony and found out that the system must indeed be reinstalled (or is it repaired?) and that whatever was on the C drive will be lost.

I have been using ATI 8.0 build 791 on my P1 300 mhz Win98SE desktop and have become a true believer, though I must admit that in many ways ATI 8.0 reminds me of the girl with a curl right in the middle of her forehead . My son agreed to hold up on that reinstall until I find out if ATI can save the day.

The notebook has only one HDD. His only means of backup (for REALLY important files) has been over his home wireless LAN to the family desktops. I believe that there is also a D drive and (from what I’ve seen on this thread) a hidden drive.

My thinking is that if ATI can save an image of his C drive before he reinstalls/repairs, then some files on his C drive might be recoverable.

Can ATI help in this situation? If so, what should be done? Would he need his own copy of ATI, a usb HDD, whatever?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

 

First of all, a repair install will not delete his C drive. Follow the instructions at:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341
(method 2)

also:
http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/repaxp.htm

And he should be good to go. You may lose outlook settings and email, but maybe you can recover those by doing as you suggest. Definitely create an image using TI and you should be able to mount it later and recover data files as needed. But I've found the repair install to work very well.

Keep in mind licensing restrictions - you may need another TI license to use on a different machine - check EULA!! My thoughts are yes, he WILL need his own copy of TI (come on, the way you brag, he should be able to afford it!! LOL just a joke), and a place to store the image.

After imaging, do the repair install and you probably won't need the image. Except possibly to recover Outlook Express data if used.

I would be concerned however, with how the Hal got corrupted in the first place. Do massive anti-virus and antispyware scanning, along with making sure it's not a hardware issue.

Good luck!

 

ATI can definitely help. The only question you need to resolve is where to put a backup image. It can't be on the Sony hard drive because the factory recovery CD may wipe that entirely. That may be the only option. You often can't do a repair or upgrade in place repair with a factory recovery CD.

If I were your son, I'd buy an external firewire hard drive if his Sony has a firewire port or an external USB 2 hard drive. Boot from the ATI Recovery CD and make an image of the C drive to the external drive. Check the image to be sure it is good. After that use the Sony rescue CD.

Buy your son a copy of ATI and have him install it on his restored Sony. Use the Explore function to move the data that he wants (e-mail, address books, documents, photos, music, etc.) back to the C drive in the exact same folder that it is in on the image file.

When he has everything restored, reboot, use DiskCleanup and then defrag the C drive and make a new ATI image of C on the external drive. The next time he has a problem, he can restore the ATI image and save himself some time.

 

jimmytop and jmk94903:

Many thanks for your help.

 

Hello Vinu,

Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

Could you please clarify whether you have the image of your son's drive? If so you may just restore it to the hard drive.

Please note that Acronis Bootable CD (which you need to boot the unbootable notebook) is part of Acronis True Image and you may not use it on more than single computer if you have only one license.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman