Technology Tales

Repairing Windows XP

I have been having an accident-prone time of it with Windows XP recently, and have had plenty of reason to be thankful for the ability to perform a repair installation. Here are the steps:

• Pop the installation disk into your PC's DVD drive and reboot the PC.
• If you have your PC set it up to boot from DVD's in its BIOS, then you at least will have the option to do this. You may find that this happens by default, but I needed to tell it to do the deed.
• Select normal installation from the first menu that is presented to you by the installer.
• Accept the licence agreement.
• Press R at the next menu and that'll repair the installation.
• Follow all the menus from there on; it'll be all the usual stuff from here on in, and there should be no need to reactivate Windows or reinstall all of your other software afterwards.

There is a repair option on the first screen (step 3 above) but this takes you into the dark recesses of the command line and isn't what I was needing. I do have to say that they do leave the required option late on in the installation process and that assumes on users having a risk taking streak in them, something that definitely does not apply to everyone. If your boot.ini file is not well, you may find yourself needing to do the full installation and that wipes the slate clean for you, extending the recovery process.

Keep a hold on those serial numbers…

In the times when all software was bought boxed, there were fewer issues with finding serial numbers, activation codes and the like. If you were tidy and retained the packaging and documentation while knowing where to find them, you were away. However, in these days of software distribution over the web, things are a little less clear-cut. The said codes tend to reside in emails sent following the purchase and, if you are like me, they tend to be scattered around the place; it is not a good thing when you need to get your software reinstalled after a system meltdown, like what I am needing to do. Another trap is that expensive software could disappear all of a sudden if your hard drive crashes, not an enticing thought. A spot of backup of both the installer and product key seems very much in order.

HAL.DLL: a roadblock on the resurrection of a poorly PC

My PC is very poorly at the moment and Windows XP re-installation is the prescribed course of action. However, I have getting errors reporting missing or damaged HAL.DLL at the first reboot of the system during installation. I thought that there might be hard disk confusion and so unplugged all but the Windows boot drive. That only gave me an error about hard drives not being set up properly. Thankfully, a quick outing on Google turned up a few ideas. I should really have started with Microsoft, since they have an article on the problem. About.com has also got something to offer on the subject and seems to be a good resource on installing XP to boot: I had forgotten how to do a repair installation and couldn't find the place in the installation menus. In any event, a complete refresh should be a good thing in the long run, even if it will be a very disruptive process. While I did consider moving to Vista at that point, bringing XP back online seemed the quickest route to getting things back together again. Strangely, I feel like a fish out of water right now, but that'll soon change...

Update: It was, in fact, my boot.ini that was causing this and replacement of the existing contents with defaults resolved the problem...

VMware and ZoneAlarm

Contrary to appearances given by this blog, I am not exclusively a Windows user. In fact, I have sampled Linux on a number of occasions in the past and I use VMware to host a number of different distributions – my Ubuntu installation is updating itself as I write this – as I like to keep tabs on what is out there. I also retain a Windows 2000 installation for testing, and have had a virtual machine hosting a test release of Vista not so long ago. I also have my finger in the UNIX world with an instance of OpenSolaris, though it is currently off my system thanks to my wrecking its graphics set up. However, ZoneAlarm has been known to get ahead of itself and start blocking VMware. If you go having a look on the web, there is no solution to this beyond a complete system refresh (format the boot drive and reinstall everything again) and I must admit that this sounds like throwing out bath, baby and bathwater together. I did find another approach, though: removing ZoneAlarm and reinstalling it. This wipes all its remembered settings, including the nefarious one that conflicted with VMware in the first place. It's remarkable that no one else has considered this, but it has worked for me, and having to have the security software relearn everything again is much less painless than rebuilding your system.