I have a friends laptop thats got some major issues, here's the story.
He needed hdd space so he tried removing his recovery partition, all the data was erased but the partition was still there so he formated it and still couldnt find a way to get the partition gone so he kind gave up.
Then when he rebooted the laptop he got this error:
So he used his xp cd and installed another copy of xp on the computer and it let him boot to that but he couldnt access his files from the first install of xp. He later told me that a few times before any of this happened it would boot up and say that the boot.ini could not be found but would start up anyway.
So i'm thinking that the file he needs was on the recovery partition -_- .
So far I tried booting from an xp re installation cd and entering the recovery console but I got an error saying it couldnt find any hard drives installed then I booted into the second install of windows and changed the boot.ini to look in the first partition of the drive and rebooted.
I guess that was a dumb idea cause now I'm back at the original error message and unable to get into the second install of windows.
Now I'm completely out of ideas, is there any way to get this thing booting from the original install of windows without erasing his data?
Thanks for taking the time to read and thanks in advance for any help at all.
He needed hdd space so he tried removing his recovery partition, all the data was erased but the partition was still there so he formated it and still couldnt find a way to get the partition gone so he kind gave up.
Then when he rebooted the laptop he got this error:
Code:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:\
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.
So he used his xp cd and installed another copy of xp on the computer and it let him boot to that but he couldnt access his files from the first install of xp. He later told me that a few times before any of this happened it would boot up and say that the boot.ini could not be found but would start up anyway.
So i'm thinking that the file he needs was on the recovery partition -_- .
So far I tried booting from an xp re installation cd and entering the recovery console but I got an error saying it couldnt find any hard drives installed then I booted into the second install of windows and changed the boot.ini to look in the first partition of the drive and rebooted.
I guess that was a dumb idea cause now I'm back at the original error message and unable to get into the second install of windows.
Now I'm completely out of ideas, is there any way to get this thing booting from the original install of windows without erasing his data?
Thanks for taking the time to read and thanks in advance for any help at all.