hi,
Long and detailed post here, please bear with me on this because I can't begin to tell you how much time I've wasted trying to get my PC to work, only for this to happen.
I'm having major issues with my dual boot system on a new hard drive. I had it up and running but then got a 'missing hal.dll' problem that just escalated after reading all kinds of solutions, and in the end I had to start over, re-formatting and everything. What I did the second time was to limit my 250GB hard drive to 137GB as my motherboard is old and the Samsung disk manager told me I may have problems.
OK, so now I get ME installed but want to waste no time getting onto XP. I have that almost finished and turn back to ME, and this is what happens:
1. Auto-detection and installation of my Logitech wireless mouse (I had meant to remove this in case there were compatability issues, but website said it should be fine), it works fine, old PS/2 mouse still connected (a setup that has worked fine under XP)
2. Installation of INF utility update that the microsoft website recommended happened before doing anything else (restart)
3. Install AGP drivers for NVidia GFX card (restart)
4. Since my desktop still looks crappy I go to control panel and manually have windows search for a better driver for my card. It finds one on my gfx card cd and restarts
5. Desktop looks great again, move onto sound card. (Creative SB Live 5.1, old card). Error on installing part of it, cannot remember which but installer carries on.
6. SYSTEM CRASH and restart in middle of sound card/utilities installation some 10 minutes later
7. Scan disk reports all is well, only now my desktop is back to looking like crap - as if my GFX card were not installed properly
8. System restore crashes in middle of operation, system restarts automatically
Cutting to the chase on the rest, I can't run system retore in safe mode either. Also my mouse cursor no longer exists. The PS/2 mouse still is attached to my PC, and has an exclamation mark by it in Device manager, it says that windows cannot load vmouse.vxd that loads the drivers for the device (Code 8). It recommends running windows setup from the cd rom...
...running setup from the cd says 'W9xsetup has caused an error in MMSYSTEM.dll', so that doesn't work.
I try removing my soundcard and gfx card from device manager and starting again but the gfx card won't install now, it says 'unable to execute' the setup file.
So, do I have to reinstall Windows from scratch (booting from CD and not entering Windows is the only way that can happen), and if so will that get rid of my dual-boot setup? And if that happens, can I get it back without destroying my XP installation? Or is there something I can do still to fix the problem?
any help much appreciated,
- tom -
Long and detailed post here, please bear with me on this because I can't begin to tell you how much time I've wasted trying to get my PC to work, only for this to happen.
I'm having major issues with my dual boot system on a new hard drive. I had it up and running but then got a 'missing hal.dll' problem that just escalated after reading all kinds of solutions, and in the end I had to start over, re-formatting and everything. What I did the second time was to limit my 250GB hard drive to 137GB as my motherboard is old and the Samsung disk manager told me I may have problems.
OK, so now I get ME installed but want to waste no time getting onto XP. I have that almost finished and turn back to ME, and this is what happens:
1. Auto-detection and installation of my Logitech wireless mouse (I had meant to remove this in case there were compatability issues, but website said it should be fine), it works fine, old PS/2 mouse still connected (a setup that has worked fine under XP)
2. Installation of INF utility update that the microsoft website recommended happened before doing anything else (restart)
3. Install AGP drivers for NVidia GFX card (restart)
4. Since my desktop still looks crappy I go to control panel and manually have windows search for a better driver for my card. It finds one on my gfx card cd and restarts
5. Desktop looks great again, move onto sound card. (Creative SB Live 5.1, old card). Error on installing part of it, cannot remember which but installer carries on.
6. SYSTEM CRASH and restart in middle of sound card/utilities installation some 10 minutes later
7. Scan disk reports all is well, only now my desktop is back to looking like crap - as if my GFX card were not installed properly
8. System restore crashes in middle of operation, system restarts automatically
Cutting to the chase on the rest, I can't run system retore in safe mode either. Also my mouse cursor no longer exists. The PS/2 mouse still is attached to my PC, and has an exclamation mark by it in Device manager, it says that windows cannot load vmouse.vxd that loads the drivers for the device (Code 8). It recommends running windows setup from the cd rom...
...running setup from the cd says 'W9xsetup has caused an error in MMSYSTEM.dll', so that doesn't work.
I try removing my soundcard and gfx card from device manager and starting again but the gfx card won't install now, it says 'unable to execute' the setup file.
So, do I have to reinstall Windows from scratch (booting from CD and not entering Windows is the only way that can happen), and if so will that get rid of my dual-boot setup? And if that happens, can I get it back without destroying my XP installation? Or is there something I can do still to fix the problem?
any help much appreciated,
- tom -
