Hi
A friend of mine has a Windows XP machine with RAID 1 (2 X 250GB SATA drives).
He needed to transfer 18GB of data to his machine. We removed his first drive and set it up in my machine. My machine normally boots from an IDE channel, but when I attached his SATA drive, the machine booted from his SATA drive instead. OK, I thought, so I transfered the data across.
Now, when he reinserted his SATA drive, he got a message saying that the hal.dll file was missing or corrupt. I assumed that his drive had reconfigured itself to start in a non-RAID system (my system), and that the boot order was now invalid. Tried to access the Recovery Console to fix the boot.ini file, but the RC refused to accept the administrator password. Downloaded the new XP setup disks from Microsoft and booted from those – still refused to accept the administrator password.
My friend then bypassed the Recovery Console and opted for XP Setup to repair the installation.
Now his machine will not boot at all.
Dell Technical Support say that his drive has probably lost data as a result of being placed in my machine (?).
He is currently trying to boot from his second RAID drive, and see if he can rebuild his first drive.
Has anyone had a similar problem? Does anyone know of a solution?