Unable to install Windows

darragh o meara

Lads and of course ladettes ,

Hoping someone here can help me out on this, I have the girlfriends computer at home in a very sick state. When she gave it to me it would not boot up and gave me a "NTDLR IS MISSING" message. Presuming it had a windows problem I asked here for the recovery discs which she didnt have!! SO we ordered a new set from HP and when they came I sat down to what is usually a painless job...

My problem is now: Each time I try to install the recovery discs it goes to the stage where it starts to copy over the files which it does, After about a minute it gives me a message saying that it cannot copy a certain file usually a dll file but this can vary. It gives me the option of Retry,Abort,Skip file. At this stage I usually click retry but it does no good. if I click skip file the same message comes up again and again after a few of these clicks I get what I call " the blue screen of death " for those of you who havent a clue what I'm talking about its the blue screen with white writing that say " Windows has encountered an error and needs to shut down" or something to this effect. At this point I have no option but to restart the computer. The whole process goes over and over again.

Thinking it was a hard disk problem I checked the cables etc and all was ok, I even got a new hard disk and cable and got the same problem. I also tried a personal copy of XP Professional ( proper copy )and this came to the same conclusion. I tried Vista and whereas Vista went a bit further in the end I get the same thing.

Can somebody please help me as this is wreaking my head. I have an excellent knowledge of computers and would consider myself able to fix most problems.. This one has just eluded me so far.

Any help would be grreatly appreciated.

Darragh

aidan_walsh

Moved from Computer Health.

Sounds like the hard drive itself may be damaged, especially if you're having issues with two different installer disks.

Auvers

yeah I would go with Aidan on this one,

try the drive in another computer as a slave and run a disk utility on it? Just to see but I would just but a new HD

mordeith

Omeara_darragh wrote: »

Lads and of course ladettes
I even got a new hard disk and cable and got the same problem.

In fairness guys it looks like he's eliminate the hard disk as a problem. Perhaps there's an issue with the BIOS. Maybe you should update it to a more recent version?

aidan_walsh

mordeith wrote: »

In fairness guys it looks like he's eliminate the hard disk as a problem.

Missed that...

Auvers

mordeith wrote: »

In fairness guys it looks like he's eliminate the hard disk as a problem

whoops missed that:o

hmmm how about trying a different optical drive or else it could by a dodgy ram module.

BKtje

I'd initially try with another optical drive as Auvers suggested and if that doesn't solve it download and run memtest from a cd to ensure its not a ram module (or since you say you know a bit about pc's you could get a similar type of module from a working machine (if available) and try it with that).

gamer

get dvd lens cleaning disk,clean the lens on the dvd drive.cost 5euro super discount hardware store 3mins walk past guineys,talbot st dublin 1.its got some indian dvds in the front window.copy cd on a pc to usb drive,set laptop bios boot from usb 1st,priority 1.you can test cds by copying them to a pals hardrive.you could use downloaded linux disk to examine hardrive,or theres emergency boot disks dl them to a cdr ,set bios boot from cdrom first.gently clean the hp cds.

quaidox

i second a different internal optical drive. happens all the time to me in work!