computers are so frustrating!!!

M

MrCoolDrumMan

New Member
Well after a week of waiting, I got the parts that I needed to get my computer up and running. But now, instead of hardware issues, it's more of a software issue this time. So heres the whole story. I turned on the computer for the first time. I put in a xp start-up disk in the floppy drive and everything went quite well. But then later in the set up, it asked for a later version of XP which I didn't have a CD for. So I realized that I had the wrong start-up disk! I went back on to Microsoft and downloaded the correct start-up disk and decided to try that. When I get to the the last floppy disk (number 6 of 6), it says "please wait..." and then about a minute later it says there is an "unknown hard error" and then right below it it says \SystemRoot\System32\ntdll.dll

So right now I'm running KillDisk on the harddrive because I have no idea what I'm doing:confused: . I'd really like to never see the blue screen of death again. Can anyone help me? Any ideas of whats going on and what I should do?

Specs:
The XP CD I have is windows XP pre-sp1
I'm running on a AMD Athon 3000+
1 GIG of Ultra memory

if you need more info to help me out, please reply.
 
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MrCoolDrumMan said:
Thanks for the reply. I can't boot from the CD drive. Anyother ideas?
Click to expand...

You should be able to boot to the cd if the system is new, on boot up is the bios seeing all drives,cd-rom,harddrive,ect.
 
I'm pretty sure the BIOs see's everything that's hooked up. Today I stripped the computer down to the bare miniumum to illiminate all possiblities. But I'm still having the same problem. I went into the bios and it says that it checks the CD drive at startup, but when i start it up it doesn't do anything with my CD. I even replaced the harddrive with a brand new one today and i'm getting the same error.

STOP: c0000221 Unkown Hard Error
\SystemRoot\System32\ntdll.dll

hope this new info helps.
 
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make sure your cd-rom is first in the boot order for your drive in the bios settings. that way you should be able to boot from the cd-rom with no problems
 
Yes, all of the drive jumpers are set to the right master/slave. The BIOS knows that too.

I set CD to boot first, but it still doesn't work. It reads it for about a second and then does nothing. Could it be a hardware issue? Or maybe a driver issue?
 
while the dots are appearing just press a key to get it to boot.... the only reason i would think why it wouldn't start is that the disk has been copied and is a non booting disk
 
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