Here is the most important question. Do you have a floppy in the drive???? There have been times I've seen no OS found or what have you , just because a floppy is in the drive. I think they should change that message to say cannot boot from boot disk A: or something like that.. cause that message is very scary.. But in your sense.. does seeem like a hard drive problem. Do you even hear the hard drive spinning up?

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The thing is that he is sometimes able to boot to windows and sometimes not. And while in windows, sometimes his PC just halts suddenly. Hence it's nothing got to do with the BIOS settings nor the boot sequences.

Simply, his harddisk is failing! Probably too old, or not well taken cared of. I suggest that when times you are able to boot into windows, copy all the important files into another harddisk. Or another alternative way is to buy another harddisk and clone your existing harddisk to the new one. That will save the trouble of copying files by files. I guess this is the most efficient and fastest way to solve your problem already.

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thanks for all the help guys! my pc is now working. although there's one thing that bothered me when i was fixing the problem. i used the bootup disk (and followed the directions according to bootdisk.com's steps), but when i used it, the pc reads from the disk drive (i.e., drive A:) but it doesn't read the bootup disk. so since this attempt didn't work, i tried epox's advice on the boot settings at start up. i have two drives (like what i've said before), one has xp home with ntfs and the other has windows98 with fat32. when i changed the boot sequence from disabled to the drive with xp home as the os, and then saved the settings and restarted the pc, it asks for the NTLDR file. but when i changed the boot sequence to the drive with windows98 as os, and saved and restarted, everything works perfectly fine. i can access both drives with ease.

does xp with ntfs has its own bootup disk?

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Glad to hear you PC is working again... Now, at least we know what happened to your windows drive... If you are missing ntloader, than it means somehow, your boot files got damaged, and xp can't boot up... There is also the fact, that you can't access your files on NTFS drive, because Windows 98 doesn't have the ability to read NTFS... Any way you put it, you need another computer. with XP installed, so you can transfer all your important data from your drive, to another one, or you need XP installation drive... I'm affraid, your deadlines will be hard to meet...

I hope we helped you, in potential future computer problems, if not in time in this situation...

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Make sure you don't have a floppy in the disk drive if you have one. That is the usual error mesage you get if there is a floppy in the drive during boot.

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apparently i was able to finish my deadlines and the presentation worked really well. unfortunately, my pc encountered the problem again. i've used the bootdisk and the computer now is trying to find a file named hal.dll from the system32 folder of my xp drive. my prof told me to use the cd installer of windows xp and choose the "repair" option at bootup to fix the problem. hopefully this time, nothing would go wrong.

i noticed one thing through this problem of mine. one of my best guess why my pc had gone bonkers was because of a virus. because everytime i load xp, a warning pops up if i should run "windspl.exe" or not. i found out from the net that this is a result of a worm that has recently been discovered. with that said, do you know any good anti-virus software that i can download? i want to fix this problem up to the last bit. grr... viruses suck

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Try these...
They are freewares..

http://www.free-av.com/
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/2/lng/us/tpl/v5

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I hope I'm not too late.
Try changing the motherboard cmos battery. I suspect your cmos battery voltage has dropped into the weak range. And that is why your computer gets the error, sometimes. Certain motherboards are picky about the battery voltage. Once the voltage drops out of this narrow range of possible voltages. Your pc then gets alz_hei_mer's dis_ease.


bob

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Well, why don’t you try to restart the computer and use a boot disk with some utilities to check on your HDD so you can be sure that it doesn’t have any problems? Because if the HDD doesn’t detect the system it could be a failure on the MBR that is the first part of the HDD and is where is stored the info that is read by the bios to recognize what it should run and everything else.

There is a program called HDD Regenerator that doesn’t touch your files and what it does is a physical scan on the disk to look after bad sector (parts of the HDD that are damaged), those causing, possibly, your computer not to boot. So the program will check your disk and try to correct those errors.

Possibly you will be able to start windows after that, but my recommendation is that you back up all the files, because in one way or another, the disk has problem and it could be possible to stop working again. After you fix it, it can also be possible (if it FOUND and FIX problems) that still your computer doesn’t enter to windows, in that case I recommend you that you take your HDD to another computer enter to Windows with the HDD of the other computer and from that Windows copy all your important files.

Hope it helps!

 

 

 

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Last month i was having the same problem , that is really awfull think that time again !
I can understand what a person can feel when recieving such erorrs.
Finally , i got rid of this awfull problem by purchaing a new branded PC
just i think that is the best way that i have selected...

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