One thing led to another. Seriously, this is getting way out of hand, occupying entire days…
Hardly a few hours after Windows had started operating as per normal, it then began to act quirky. The title bar of whichever window I had open in Windows Explorer started flashing and getting out of focus, pulling up ‘My Computer’ would take ages and at the end only to result in a blank folder, Safe Mode still doesn’t work and would only initialise a re-loop, all my System Restore points had disappeared, and worst of all, the whole system would stop working without warning and for no reason, sometimes when I am signing into Windows, and sometimes after I’ve logged on and am doing something. Anything. It would just freeze, and I’d had to do a hard reset. I could get nothing done.
Then came another surprise: it gave me a “Invalid Boot.ini” message upon reboot, and so I thought it could be solved by doing that trick through Linux again. But this time, it displayed yet another error: “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: WindowsSystem32Hal.dll”. By that time I had managed to find an XP Pro installation disk, so I put that in and ran the Recovery Console, trying out almost every single tip there was to be had on the ‘net. Tried dumping in a working copy of HAL.DLL from another XP computer too, but it still couldn’t find it or load it.
I was thinking of giving up, and succumbing to a re-format and re-installation of XP, now that I had backed up all my files and had a copy of the installation disk.
So I went ahead, through gritted teeth, and tried to re-install Windows.
BUT when I got to those dreaded blue screens, I was told “Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer” and could proceed no further! Turns out that my laptop was using a SATA controller that isn’t natively supported by XP. Again I turned to Google for the answers… tried a couple of things, and found one which worked - a technique called slipstreaming which allows you to incorporate drivers into a bootable installation disk.
Hurrah for my old S2020 with dual-boot Windows and Linux for acting as my technical ambulance ops centre, without which I’d have been thoroughly crippled.
I’m now midway through re-formatting my drive… if the installation does not come through, I’d really go crazy!