http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:ll ... =clnk&cd=7

That link basically describes what has happened. He bluescreened suddenly and on restart it said hal.dll was corrupt or missing. So he tried a repair from the winxp disc and it restarted again, this time with some error about system32. Now he cannot do any kind of repair, he gets to the stage where you choose the windows xp installation you want to repair, he presses '1' and the system hangs on a black screen before rebooting again. Same happens if he tries to install windows.

Any ideas?

You guys have multiple PCs, right? The first thing I'd do is take his harddrive, set it to slave (if it's PATA) and hook it up to your working machine. Back up all his crap. This'll also verify that the hard drive didn't crap out on you.

Then i'd boot off the XP disk (with his HD back in his machine) and choose the option to delete all the partitions. See what happens. If it can't create/delete partitions or whatever, there may be something wrong with either the hard drive or the hard drive controller. If the latter, that's bad news... there's no fixing that short of replacing the motherboard.

But anyway, see what happens first.

Yay, I'm back baby. Thanks for the reply satis.

Just before I went swapping Hard Drives (THat was our next step - I was worried about it being a virus and didn't really want to infect pev's PC, but still, if it had to be done, it had to be done) I basically went in and removed and reinsterted every single connection. None of the usual give it a nudge to make sure it's in ok.

I don't know if it was that, or the fact I had my PC completely powered down for a few minutes that helped, but I plugged everything back in, and now it all works great - except for my sound card.

I've been having troubles with it recently, so I might look in to replacing it in the not so distante future.

cool, glad you're back up. You seem to have horrible luck with PCs.

I know

Right. This happened whilst it was changing from track 2 to 3 on a green day album of mine.

I've been having a few problem here and there with my sound card - but normally it's just come a bit loose.

Just in case, I'm going to up date/reinstall the drivers if there aren't any new ones out, but I'd just like to know, could all this be caused by the sound card?

maybe, if it's crapping out on you. Hardware starting to go out can cause all kinds of wierd things.

Maybe the government is hacking you to see what your up to.

that can cause wierd things too. Everyone knows the government's keyloggers are crap.

Sometimes on this forum, I wish I wasn't Christian.

Is it my avatar? Or 11b's heckling?

Sometimes on this forum, I wish I wasnt being spied on by my government.

Sometimes on this forum, I wish a chimp would rub my balls.

that's all the time, not just on this forum

Yeah. I should really tell your mother to go home.

It would be 11b's heckling. I'm sometimes not proud to have things in common with 11b the way he seems to "act" all the time .I know you can't realy act on a forum, and you also can't always get a sense of how something is being said. Which is why I haven't outburst like Pig did recently.