Hard Light Productions Forums

Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: JGZinv on August 26, 2009, 11:20:36 pm

Title: PC Problem: Boot.ini corrupts on every boot
Post by: JGZinv on August 26, 2009, 11:20:36 pm
Pretty much what the title says.

Got a gentlemen who I'm trying to fix his comp.
It's an older Athlon 64 Compaq tower running XP Home.
Microsoft wireless notebook intelli mouse 3000, couple of external drives.

He went to install a new external drive, system froze up and he shut it
down via the kill switch. When it booted he tried safe mode and it says
hal.dll is missing or corrupt, system won't boot.

I got into it today, tried rebuilding the MBR, tried a fixboot, replacing the
hal.dll by putting the HD into another machine as slave (all files were present)
and it still wouldn't work.

Ending up rebuilding the boot.ini via the recovery console, then doing a Windows repair
to wipe out the system files. Everything short of the fact the system needed about 200 updates,
was pretty good.

However still had a wireless mouse issue, pretty straightforward and detailed on the web.
Except the install for the update / new drivers will never complete. It ends in error, no details.
Each time the system gets to windows, it tries to reinstall this particular part of the mouse, even though
it's working on screen, and ends in error.

So I went to try running in a diagnostic/safe mode, after that the hal.dll issue returned. You have to rebuild the boot.ini
every time the system starts, or it'll be stuck at the error.

System restore of course, doesn't have any points prior to today, now that I did the repair.

I've run out of tools to try, so I'm looking for new ideas.

What would cause the boot.ini to corrupt at every boot (or possibly during shut down)?
Title: Re: PC Problem: Boot.ini corrupts on every boot
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on August 26, 2009, 11:32:26 pm
Virus, bad boot sector on the HD, wrong bios settings, corrupted bios. 
Title: Re: PC Problem: Boot.ini corrupts on every boot
Post by: jr2 on August 27, 2009, 01:44:51 pm
IE8 can do that.

http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2009/06/13/they-outdid-themselves
Title: Re: PC Problem: Boot.ini corrupts on every boot
Post by: Titan on August 27, 2009, 01:50:15 pm
THE MOST RETARDED THING EVER.

Why would you even have something like that in a directory that can be changed like that?
Title: Re: PC Problem: Boot.ini corrupts on every boot
Post by: JGZinv on August 27, 2009, 04:29:57 pm
Wow... that's exactly what this thing is doing.

Going to give that a shot soon as I can.
Title: Re: PC Problem: Boot.ini corrupts on every boot
Post by: JGZinv on August 27, 2009, 09:11:58 pm
Well I "uninstalled" IE8 and it still was a problem, then found the alternative method
using to forced uninstaller... still didn't work. Reinstalled IE7 and it's back to normal.

Thanks for the info, that's one weird problem. Glad I'm a FireFox user ^_^
Title: Re: PC Problem: Boot.ini corrupts on every boot
Post by: Stormkeeper on August 28, 2009, 01:28:31 am
It seems Vista is 'safe' from that IE8 error tho.
Title: Re: PC Problem: Boot.ini corrupts on every boot
Post by: jr2 on September 04, 2009, 05:03:04 pm
That's cause Vista doesn't use boot.ini - It uses some sort of BCD config, I forget what exactly it does but the settings are in the file 'bcd' in your \boot directory, IIRC.