ARGHH!!! HELP! Computer gone BAD :(

Guru

Guru

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Soldato
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Ok, I don't know whats going on but basically I have an 80gig hdd and a 200gig one and today my computer went pooh and said something about hal.dll being missing. I read some fixes on the internet and have coppied hal.dll off my xp cd and put it on my system...

This got me bootable again, BUT ALL my hardware drivers re-installed when it booted, the gfx was in 640x480 and all my drivers had messed up.

I've reinstalled them all, BUT! Now BOTH my HDD's are showing as 76.3gig

and although I can still see the stuff on my 200gig drive, its mainly saying filesizes of 0 bytes.

Only twigged it was messed up when I went to watch a movie that's saved on the 200gig and it failed to open.

In the Bios the 200gig says:

200GB
65535
16
0
65534
255

Which afaik is what its always said.

Anyone please help me make it show 200 in windows and get me the 100+ gig of data I appear to have lost back :(

Cheers in advance,

G

/edit also Daemon tools just said invalid device everytime my pc boots now.
 
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Also just went to shut it down. Normally it would just switch off. But this time it said:

It is now safe to turn off your computer

WTF!! Dunno what is going on but its doing my nut! :confused: :(
 
There are a lot of threads on here about issues with hal.dll and it appears to be hard-drive/motherboard related.

If it's SATA, then it could be a driver issue and you may have to download a SATA controller driver (floppy) from the hard-drive's manufacturer website.

Also what Motherboard do you have?
 
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Sounds something like what my old Abit Nforce 4 Ultra board did when it decided to kick the bucket...

It never really died, just went a bit doolaly, bit like an old relative ;)

If a full format (including removing partitions) doesnt work my guess would be your motherboard is beginning to let go, although its very annoying to diagnose as ALL the logic is in one chip on those boards...
 
Sounds like windows is royally messed up,perhaps only a clean install will let you see whats going on.
Maybe try drives in another machine,backup what you can and try fresh install.
If its still acting up try one stick good ram/different psu.I`m suspecting mobo myself but you might get lucky with a fresh install.
 
doh! I went to reinstall windows and it showed c: drive d: drive and 112gig odd off unpartitioned space. Foolishly I clicked enter on it to check it out, and it had partitioned it making it a g: drive (e and f are dvd's).

Is there any way to make my d: drive back into the single 200gigs and KEEP the 112gig of data I seem to have lost?

Cheers,

G
 
please help :(

I dont know how to change the partitions back into 1 and restore the original file structure. I'm sure nothing has actually been deleted.

Anyone any ideas?

I've tried a program called partition doctor, but it didn't have the option to do what I needed.

Just to clarify, my C: drive which is phiysically one drive of 80gig appears to be fine now.

Some how my computer thinks my D: drive which is physically 200gig is 2 seperate drives, one is the same size as the C: drive and the other is the remaining 112gig now called G:.

I want the D: and the G: back into one 200gig partition with all the data restored.

Nothing has been formatted so the data should be there still, I do not think formatting my c: drive would work as it would still leave the D: and G: drives incorrect.

Cheers,

G
 
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i could be wrong but i dont think you can join partitions without loosing data on one of them as it would require at least one partition table to be deleted.

Personally id find a large external storage device and backup both partitions then start the whole thing again, removing all partitions and setting up a C and D during windows install.
 
manic_man said:
i could be wrong but i dont think you can join partitions without loosing data on one of them as it would require at least one partition table to be deleted.

Personally id find a large external storage device and backup both partitions then start the whole thing again, removing all partitions and setting up a C and D during windows install.
Click to expand...

The G: Drive thinks its empty, I dont mind deleting the table for that one as it shouldnt even have one. All I want to do is make the D: drive 200gig.

It's weird cause ALL the file names are still on the D: drive in the same structure as before, but most of the movies etc say 0 bytes so I can't back them up :(
 
hmm sounds to me like the D partition is corrupted...

Programs such as Partition Magic and others along the same lines should be able to join the partitions back together.. whether your going to loose data though i wouldnt like to say, file sizes at 0 bytes is never a good sign...

Might be worth trying the drive in another computer if possible to make sure the problem definately isnt with your SATA / IDE controller.
 
I can recommend Acronis disk director suite that joins partitions fine,partitionmagic has been known to corrupt ntfs partitions-happened to me.
O&Odiskrecovery might help get back some files,its the only program to my mind that recovered something useful and i tried a whole bunch.Maybe use it first if it can see it.
 
argh... don't give him advice on joining the patitons... or anything else that might write to the disc until hes tried to actually recover the data - anything else is likely to make sure its lost forever...

You need some decent diagnostic tools to try and recover the data from the drive to either repair the partition or recover the files to another disc...

hal.dll is part of the hardware abstract layer (generic software/hardware interface) and doesn't point to one specific fault... however it suddenly dissapearing might indicate that you have something really screwed with your disc controllers (are you overclocking?)
 
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there are un-delete utilities that will restore (sometimes) from partition deletion...

id have advised jsut running windows scandisk on the drive frm another known good pc, had you not re-partitioned however
 
Rroff said:
argh... don't give him advice on joining the patitons... or anything else that might write to the disc until hes tried to actually recover the data - anything else is likely to make sure its lost forever...

You need some decent diagnostic tools to try and recover the data from the drive to either repair the partition or recover the files to another disc...

hal.dll is part of the hardware abstract layer (generic software/hardware interface) and doesn't point to one specific fault... however it suddenly dissapearing might indicate that you have something really screwed with your disc controllers (are you overclocking?)
Click to expand...

I'm not overclocking. I've copied the hal.dll from the xp cd to all my drives folling the advice I found by googling :/

Could this have cause the crazy disk mess up?

Also could you recommend some tools to use to help me please? :)
 
Amonlym said:
there are un-delete utilities that will restore (sometimes) from partition deletion...

id have advised jsut running windows scandisk on the drive frm another known good pc, had you not re-partitioned however
Click to expand...

Aye fully gutted that the XP setup partitioned the drive, its mounted it but not formatted it.

So bizzare that both HDD's now show 76.3gig even though I know one's 200!! ARGGHHS!!!
 
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Guru said:
I'm not overclocking. I've copied the hal.dll from the xp cd to all my drives folling the advice I found by googling :/

Could this have cause the crazy disk mess up?

Also could you recommend some tools to use to help me please? :)
Click to expand...
the default hal.dll is for none acpi none multi processor/core systems, thats why acpi is turned off and you get the "you can now turn off your computer" thing, i think halaacpi is the one for boards which can use multi cores/processors and acpi.
 
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http://www.undelete-plus.com/download.html

give that a go, its the most pormising link i found in google.. its not the prog i was thinking of (i used before but lost now).

here are the geenral rules for getting your files back:

DONT save anything at all to the drive.
Dont recover to the same physical drive
try and use another known good and stable pc for it.
prey that your hdd was resonably un-fragmented.
be aware that the bigger the file, the more likely its gonna be corrupt.

good luck.
 
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