2 posts tagged “windows”

My friend bought a laptop (Gateway MX8738). He quickly found out that he wasn't a fan of Vista, so I said I would install XP Pro on it for him. I recently did something similar to this on a windows 98 computer for a relative, where I put in new parts (hard drive, ram, WLAN card), and installed windows xp pro perfectly fine.

So it looked like a relatively easy task. I used DBAN/Nuke to wipe the hard drive, then I popped in the xp pro disc. Then I got an error. I googled around and found out I needed a SATA driver. Unfortunately, these have to be installed via floppy. The laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, so I slipstreamed the driver using nLite. I made a disc, and started to install. I got past the original error until I got another error telling me my driver was corrupted. (iaStor.sys)

Then I found that I might have needed to change some drive configurations in the Bios (version 72.15). I've looked through it for a good half an hour and cannot find anything to do with the hard drive other than boot order.

So the question is, am I screwed?

Windows has defeated me. My dad's laptop has been having issues with exe's like Word, Outlook, and Explorer in general. It suffers from the elusive nldll.dll error. He says it's been going for weeks and months, but decided to tell me about it today.

So I've gotten RegCure from McAfee, and found 1,000s of problems. I cleaned it out. I handpicked through the registry and deleted copies of suspicous exe's. Other problems I'd seen on forums were DVD drives and graphics card drivers. I took out the DVD drive and updated the graphics card drivers. I hunted down fragments of Spybot S&D and got rid of them. I ran AdAware multiple times. Still not working.

I reinstalled Office. I reinstalled XP. Still nothing.

At this point I don't think wiping the C Drive will even help.

Macs ftw.