[phileysmiley]

Continued from here:
http://www.pronetworks.org/forum/story103511

Grrr...I searched Google and found literally thousands of answers to this. Bad hard drive, bad motherboard, bad RAM, bad Windows, etc. etc. People completely reinstalled Windows twice and it didn't solve it.

This is a relatively brand new hard drive with a fresh install of Windows (a couple of months).

Trying some things:

1) Rebooted into Safe Mode, scheduled chkdsk, rebooted. Running CHKDSK.

[Grav!ty]

If you can boot into safe mode without any problem, it means your Windows installation is fundamentally ok, and it could just be that your hardware abstraction layer is corrupt. Replacing your hal.dll from the Windows XP CD may fix the problem.

You'll need to boot to the recovery console of the XP CD and once you get to the command prompt (after selecting the Windows installation and entering your password), type:

expand D:\i386\hal.dl_ C:\windows\system32\hal.dll (where D:\ is your CD/DVD drive letter and C:\ is your Windows installation drive letter) and then press Enter. Type Y if you get any warnings about overwriting files and then exit from the recovery console and reboot.

It could also be ntoskrnl.exe that is out of kilter and this command, also from the recovery console will replace that:

expand D:\i386\ntoskrnl.ex_ C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe

[phileysmiley]

Well, CHKDSK finished, it rebooted, and all is okay.

[JabbaPapa]

Well, CHKDSK finished, it rebooted, and all is okay.

Then this would be symptomatic of some kind of I/O issues in the computer -- although I'd guess that the hard drive is most likely good.

Most likely candidates for being the cause of errors such as these are bad data cables (IDE ribbons or SATA cables), and PSU starting to flake out (although any other bad components can have the same effects).

If you get this or similar problems again, then maybe check the PSU ?

One way to test your PSU is to try running power- and resource- demanding software, such as a graphics-heavy computer game. If your PSU is not up to speed, then the game should freeze, crash, cause shutdown, and other niceties -- although less demanding software will keep on working during normal usage.

BTW, if this continues, then your XP setup will most likely become permanently corrupted, requiring a fresh install

[phileysmiley]

It's a laptop, so I'm not sure how I'd test that out. I'm not a gamer so I can't really do anything along those lines. It never happened before so...you know what they say...if it happens once, it's a glitch. Let's just hope it stays that way.

BTW, if this continues, then your XP setup will most likely become permanently corrupted, requiring a fresh install

Fortunately, since my HD recently had to be replaced and a fresh XP install, I'm now doing regular backups so if I need to reinstall again it won't be as much of a disaster.

[nightfire]

you know, i had something similar happen to me. My cheap 120 hd started doing that with windows, and somehow or another i lost all the references on the harddrive, and by the time i got it to work, i had lost an entire folder, sort of strange too.

Cause by a faulty backup, lost just one folder and corrupted the references