I have a HP compaq nc8430 that won't boot up ,I had a problem at first removing some antivirus program, so as I didn't have anything worth keeping stored on it, I decided to do a fresh install from the recovery partition on the hard drive,all seemed fine so I then went into my C drive and deleted the two folders that had been created during the recovery because they had all the old files in from before the recovery and I wanted to get a bit more space ,that's when the problem started I think, because when I next went to turn on my laptop the first message I got was the NTLDR is missing, so I tried a disk I had that was meant to fix the ntldr problem it had 10 choices starting 1 try this first down to no 10 but no joy because I then got Windows couldn't start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>system32\hal.dll. Please re-install a cop[y of the above file. I did try to do a repair with a xp disk but the computer can't see the operating system or hard drive ,can you please help ,thanks in advance,

Did you damage the recovery partition? If not, you should reinstall from that partition -- again. It will overwrite everything on the hard drive.

Thank you for your reply PERITO, I have damaged my boot table I think as the computer can't see the hard drive or operating system I used a utility cd to make sure the files are still there and they are but the primary and logical settings have become corrupted or mixed up so the computer can`t load because of this ,I did try to repair the problem by by using a utility to try and fix the boot file table ,but now am getting a non system disk or disk error, replace and strike any key when ready message I tried to use a xp disk to run the repair utility but it still cannot see the hard drive so I am getting to press R to preform recovery then it says that it cannot see the hhard drive and then press f3 to restart, thanks again for you help and interest.

Quote:

---

I tried to use a xp disk to run the repair utility but it still cannot see the hard drive so I am getting to press R to preform recovery then it says that it cannot see the hard drive and then press f3 to restart, thanks again for you help and interest.

---

I'm not sure what you mean by "boot table". You should be able to modify the boot order by getting into the Bios. There's no way to damage that "list" -- i.e. the boot order.

It seems pretty clear that whatever is on the hard drive right now is irrecoverable. Nevertheless, it should be possible to boot from a CD (a Windows Installation CD) and repartition and reformat the hard drive and install Windows to it.

You said you tried to run the repair utility. Restart (reboot from) that disk. When it gets to "R", bypass that. Just accept that you can't repair the system. If it finds a partition, you should delete it and then recreate and reformat the partition. If it doesn't find a partition, then just create one and format it.

Follow these instructions. This will do a "clean install" and should get you up and running:

XP Clean Install

Did you try steps below for repair
Perform a Repair Installation

He tried that. It didn't work. The XP disk doesn't see a formatted partition on the hard drive.