[GSRCRXsi]

so a few weeks back my laptop finally took a **** on me.

it wouldnt charge, and the battery was dying with every use. it was a progressive problem and i determined the problem to be the power jack on the mother board. i got instructions on how to disassemble the laptop (Compaq Evo N600c) and pulled the MB out, desoldered the old jack. and soldered on the new one.

while i was in there i noticed the 56k modem was attached via a mini PCI slot. so i started throwing around the idea of installing an internal Wi-Fi card (since my PC card was broken from dropping it, and it will look cleaner). i bought all the parts. and got to work.

i took it all apart. replaced the power jack on the mother board, and installed the wireless card. when booting the computer back up. it took FOREVER to load windows. on the order of hours. but eventually it loaded and everything was fine. even after more reboots, it didnt take as long. i think its because i unplugged the RTC battery, but im not sure. i did have to reset the time though. installed the software for the card and it worked great within like 10 ft (no antenna yet). and the power jack was working as well. great.

so then i had to wait about a week for the antenna to get here. got it all taken apart again, installed the antennas in the lid, put it back together and fired it up. again took forever to load, but this time never finished loading.

it would run though the start up process, (win 2k)
say "windows is starting up..."
then "preparing network connections..."
then "applying security policy..."

all normal, then go blue screen (not the bad blue screen, the windows background) and just have the cursor in the middle. after a while it will have the hour glass next to it like its working, then back to the normal cursor and there it sits. i let it sit like that over night and nothing. it never got to the login screen. and no sign that the hard drive is hard at work (no light)

so i tried rebooting to get it to kick over and then during the start-up process it would go black and say
"ERROR c-0000218 could not load hive file, dumping physical memory to disk" then reboot itself. it did this about 3 times and then when it started back up it said
"Windows could not start because following file is missing or corrup ... <windows root>\system32\hal.dll > > Please reinstall a copy of the above file."

so i shut it off, and did some digging on what this means. seems to be that boot file gets corrupt sometimes, some have linked it to memory, some to the HDD, some to the MB. most of the fixes seem to involve re-writing code in this file. something beyond me.

so i go back to it and load it upand it starts up fine, just doesnt fully load like the initial problem. just gets to the blue screen with the cursor and stops. its been going for about an hour now.

WTF happened? any help? i took it apart by the book, and same with re-assembly. i didnt break anything, and handled everything with care. all i did between it running fine last night and being messed up was take it apart and install the antenna. thats it.

 

[coldtotouch]

check this out.

If you are getting the hal.dll error, most likely you have more than one hard drive/partitions. Don't think replacing it right away solves the issue. Majority of cases it wont. In fact if you do, your problem most likely wont be resolved and replacing the hal.dll you will have to reinstall drivers for all existing hardware.

Unplug all your secondary hard drives and leave your main harddrive connected. Boot up using a "BootCD" or some kind of NTFS boot floppy or whatever. Enough to get you to a dos prompt. Go to the root of your c:\ drive. You will see your BOOT.INI file. There is also a backup of this file, most cases called BOOT.BKK Rename the boot.ini to bootback.bak, then rename boot.bkk to boot.ini

Reboot the system. You should be good to go. If success, reconnect your other hard drives. Also make sure you are booting the correct drive thru bios boot priority.

Do this as a simple step first. If still having a problem. Boot directly from the XP CD, and choose R for recovery console. For those that say "I can't boot from CD...", go into your bios, and have your system boot from CD Drives FIRST. Reboot and leave XP CD in. You will see a quick "press any key to boot from CD". Hit a key. Wait till a minute or so after loading. Hit R for Recovery console.

Quick notes..before I continue. If you do decide to go this route. Make sure to leave all hard drives connected. Upon Recovery Console executing, it will scan hard drives for windows installations. If you have more than one installation, it will ask for which installation to log into. Please be sure to log into the primary installation. Also, if there is a main password. Make sure to have it handy. Your normal account password wont do. If you installed XP and created a password for 'Administrator', this is THE password you need.

After successfully login in to the installation. Do the commands.

Chkdsk /f
bootcfg /rebuild
fixboot
fixmbr

Reboot, and you should be good to go. Replacing the hal.dll is not a option. Even if you are getting the missing hal.dll error, I will bet you if you boot with a bootcd and manually check the windows\system32 directory, you will see a hal.dll file there. If for some reason you will just go ahead and want to try the replacing hal.dll file, at least rename the existing hal.dll file to hal.bak, then replace.

taken from here

However, THIS seems good...

 

[GSRCRXsi]

ive seen fixes like those, but i dont have a win2k disc... i bought the laptop used, didnt come with the disc. i do have a key and the OS installed though. im currently downloading a disc image to burn to a disc and try it out.

and im not getting the hal.dll error anymore, just goes to the blue background screen right before the login screen pops up but it never pops up, and just stops.

i dont know if the hal.dll is still a problem or not, it hasnt said anything about it since, just the same boot problem

 

['9445]

I am not a windows guy, I do Macs and linux on PC hardware ... but it sounds to me like you have a disk problem. If you can't get windows to boot to run a disk tester you might try something like this if you can download and burn it:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

it's a bootable cd with a boot manager that lets you select from a bunch of standalone boot images which includes a bunch of disk testers from the disk mfgrs (seagate, maxtor, etc) and also other standalone test utilities.

The other diagnosis is to put your ear to the laptop and listen while it's trying to boot. If the disk is making some repetitive noises all the time as windows attempts to load, it's probably struggling to read the data. Kind of hard to describe what to listen for here but basically what happens is that the disk tries to read a bad area, does a recalibration sequence, then tries again, until it finally gets something or gives up. The recalibration usually moves the head over the whole disk and that's the repetitive noise you'll hear, different from the usual "chuckling" noises disks make.

 

[GSRCRXsi]

new updates

laptop seemed extremely hot. seems to get hotter then normal, right around the area where the HD is. i shut it off since it wasnt loading anyway. and turned it back on after it cooled down.

got the dreaded blue screen =(

STOP: c0000221 {Bad Iamge Checksum}
The image olecli32.dll is possibly corrupt. the header checksum does not match the computed checksum.

what now? what does that mean?

 

[GSRCRXsi]

ok... and just like the last error, its a 1 time thing. its not showing up anymore, WTF!

 

[baker_jeff]

Sounds like it could be a failing HDD. Search on the Compaq site to see if there is a diagnostic you can run on your system.

 

[HRX22]

Does it blue screen everytime you try to restart it and gives you the same error code?

 

[crxfisher]

I say get one of these: http://www.provantage.com/cables-go-17705~7CBTR00E.htm

You can use that to put the laptop drive in a desktop machine so you can copy your data off while you still can. In most cases, you will be able to copy most or all of your data.

I was originally thinking it didn't sound like the hard drive itself was going out but now it does seem that way.

 

[GSRCRXsi]

Does it blue screen everytime you try to restart it and gives you the same error code?

no, ive ony had errors pop up twice. and havent seen the same error twice. 90% of the time it gets to the point right before the login screen and stops.

 

['9445]

I say get one of these: http://www.provantage.com/cables-go-17705~7CBTR00E.htm

Another option is one of these:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?InvtId ... &cpc=RECOM

You don't need to open the computer to use this kind, it plugs into a usb port.

Either way you may need some kind of recovery software because it's possible windows will refuse to mount it.

Another option if there's stuff you absolutely have got to recover is one of the many disk recovery services (google it) ... it'll probably be $200-300 but you send them the disk and they do what they can do to get your data off, which may include temporarily reparing the disk enough to get it to read.

 

[GSRCRXsi]

ok, so for fear the HD might be going, i downloaded Knoppix. got it burned to a cd, and the laptop runs fine with it. i had a little trouble with copying files to the jump drive, but mike (b16) helped me out with that. just waiting on my windows cd to finish downloading and try to reinstall windows and see if it helps any.

 

[GSRCRXsi]

anyone have an image of SP4 for win 2k? or a disc they can make the image from?

 

[mattminerDOTcom]

yup. I have win2k including sp4, i can send that to you tomnorrow...alternatively i could send it to you somehow, but that may be slow i only have a 2 megabit upload here.

[email protected]

 

[GSRCRXsi]

i just need an image of the SP4 disc

 

[JustAnotherRex]

Woo hoo! More conversions to Knoppix.

STD is excellent if you want to test network security :deadhorse:.

Edit: On the note of your topic, I was going to offer advice but it seemed like everyone covered it better than I would have, and unfortunately I don't and haven't ever run Win2k I'm afraid.

 

[mattminerDOTcom]

ok well, do you want me to file transfer/link it to you somehow or do you want me to fedex you a disc?

Its 369MB.

[email protected]

 

[Ragnaarok]

Just don't ever buy Compaq again, they are poop. Yes, I said poop.

Nothing but bad experiences with them.

 

[GSRCRXsi]

ok well. im back up and running 2000 (for now). everything is running great. a little PITA getting all the drivers again but its back. and i saved all my important data thanks to knoppix. then i reformatted and reinstalled the OS. it didnt even ask for the SP4 disc this time, must have jest been messed up. thank you all for offering to help though, i appreciate it.

the wireless is working fine as well. theres just some things im a little confused about.

first the wireless works fine, but the signal is weak. when i go far (as in the other side of the apartment) i thought the antennas were supposed to increase the signal, but they really havent done much. when installing the antennas, i noticed the lid is metal, and not plastic. could this be blocking the signal?

second, the internet via ethernet doesnt work. when i try to add another network connection, the wizard doesnt give me the option to add another LAN connection. but when i installed the drivers for the wireless card it automatically made it a LAN connection. any idea there?

this has def been a learning experience, thanks for all the help

edit:
also tried installing AIM 6.0 and it says i dont meet the system requirements of 42 MB free space, 128MB ram, and running XP/2K. i have near 25GB free space, 512MB ram, and i am running 2K, whats the deal? anyone have a similar problem?

 

[GSRCRXsi]

ok i moved the antennas to a spot where they shouldnt be blocked. only covered by plastic, not metal. link quality wasnt really affectd but the speed seems to be better. i think the antennas just may be ****ty. fixed the ehternet problem too. just had to find the right driver.

still having problems with AIM 6.0, though. anyone?