[daveybluenose]

been trying all day to format and reinstall windows on2 a hard drive getting various error messages it appears some win me files and winxp files are on h/d but some files are missing have tried making a new boot up disk but getting either i/o error or its not recognising my harddrive and giving me other errors latest error is win could not start misisng file <win root> \system32\hal.dll please re install
any advice how to get round this and boot up and format harddrive i have access to another pc beside dud one if thats of any use

[smercer]

What OS do you want on the drive? What file system is on the drive? If it is NTFS then Windows ME won't be able to access it\reinstall on it.

and make sure that all files you want to keep is backed up on a different drive or partition.

Try making a boot up disk from your spare PC, as a Windows 98 or another ME boot disk from a different machine will work with windows ME but in a different way.

One other thing, Make sure you are not making a boot up disk on a corupted floppy disk, because you will get errors garrenteed.

[mr_bumbles]

<edited by un4given1> Just a little clean up...

[eidenk]

<edited by un4given1> Just a little clean up...

[smercer]

<edited by un4given1> Just a little clean up...

I think you might be right about having the quote box there. I'll take it out for you.


<edited by un4given1> Just a little clean up...

@daveybluenose: Sorry about all that political stuff, Did you get your problem fixed?

[At0mic]

daveybluenose, on Apr 23 2005, 09:56 PM, said:

been trying all day to format and reinstall windows on2 a hard drive  getting various error messages  it appears some win me files and winxp files are on h/d but some files are missing  have tried making a new boot up disk but getting either i/o error or  its not recognising my harddrive and giving me other errors latest error is win could not start misisng file <win root> \system32\hal.dll please re install
any advice how to get round this and boot up and format harddrive i have access to another pc beside dud one if thats of any use
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

If you want to format your hard drive, why on earth are you worried about missing windows files? The whole lot will be missing after a format!!!
Assuming your drive was originally formated with FAT, all you have to do is boot to a prompt and type "format c:"
Anyway, what OS do you wish to install so I can advise?

<edited by un4given1> Just a little clean up...

[Ge0ph]

It's not daveybluenose's post they are talking about, it's smercer's post that has the offensive stuff.

[At0mic]

Ge0ph, on Apr 25 2005, 07:08 PM, said:

It's not daveybluenose's post they are talking about, it's smercer's post that has the offensive stuff.
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I know I was being sarcastic

[eidenk]

@At0mic

You should have seen the thread with the quote box in the siggie to truly understand my post. For the rest bumbles had already posted an opinion so I had my say as well. I prefer this than complaining to a moderator in the back of someone. So apologies to everyone I might have offended. Next time I'll PM the posters. That's what I should have done probably. Now I will tell you something else before PMing anyone : You comment on someone else's siggie in your last post after having told me I was out of order for doing so myself. Will you please now stick yourself to the standards you expect from others. Question closed as far as far as I am concerned.

@daveybluenose

It's not that straightforward sometimes to install Windows from scratch with just a CD-ROM and an unformatted drive. I don't do this often so I would not really be able to tell you more than the aproximate following : You need fdisk.exe from the boot floppy to create your partition and set it active. Then once this is done you need to format it. I am not sure whether Windows Setup automatically formats an unformated drive. Anyway format.com is in the win9x folder of your CD along with the installation cabs and some other tools. "format C:" without the quotes is what you must type. As well you want to set your BIOS to boot on the CD so that you can boot into Setup. Consult your motherboard manual as to how to do so. As well as your drive is not new, I would strongly suggest that, before all, you erase its data by runing a dedicated wiping utility as to avoid potential problems with shaddow partitions. You don't need to overwrite the whole disk but run it one hour or two to make sure the beginning of the disk is properly overwritten. You may want to download the Ultimate Boot CD to do so. There are several tools to choose from on it plus plenty of other extremely useful utilities.

[At0mic]

eidenk, on Apr 25 2005, 09:03 PM, said:

@At0mic

You comment on someone else's siggie in your last post

Sorry, but I dont know what you mean by this.

[un4given1]

OK... let's see if we can keep this on topic now... Good? Great!

[tarquel]

Quote

been trying all day to format and reinstall windows on2 a hard drive getting various error messages it appears some win me files and winxp files are on h/d but some files are missing have tried making a new boot up disk but getting either i/o error or its not recognising my harddrive and giving me other errors latest error is win could not start misisng file <win root> \system32\hal.dll please re install
any advice how to get round this and boot up and format harddrive i have access to another pc beside dud one if thats of any use

er....right.

This is a bit confusing - for one, if you are installing Windows XP, then you should be posting this in the appropriate section of the forum, even if you're making a dual-boot setup (ME & XP) not that I've bothered with this so can't really help with that side of things.

Is this a old pc or something as it seems to be all over the place? with things not working and so on.

What I recommend is using a boot disk by your "hard drive" manufacturer that can analyze the hd - fix any problems it finds (yes, they can fix "some" problems) - even low level format it (only if there isn't any information you want on the hard drive of course) and with a tool like Maxtor's MaxBlast book disk, you can even make and setup multiple partitions so that if you are going to install multiple OS's by partition, you have the partitions all setup (or even if you just want a seperate data partition, its another handy way to do it).

There's plenty of info on dual boot/multi-booting OS's if you search the forum for it.

Let us know how that goes for you and give us a bit more feedback on the situation please

Regards,
N.