[alant092]

Hey guys this is quite a long story but I would be very frateful for any help you could give.

I bought a faulty laptop off my friend assuming that it just needed a fresh install off Vista, I installed Vista and now on bootup i get the error saying a file is missing, the file is usually "winload.exe" but can sometimes be other files which I cant remember the name of. Some times Vitsa will load up fine and the laptop would be perfect, but 90% percent of the time i got this error, whichis really boggling me.

I then tried to do a fresh install of XP, during the install I get a blue error screen, saying there is something wrong with my hardware and to run fdisk on my hard drive. I couldnt do this due to not being able to boot up so I bought a fresh new hard drive trying to fix the problem. I installed this HD and started the XP installation again, I am still getting the error message and I am stumped on what to try next.

Does anyone have any ideas or pointers? they would be greatly appreciated, thank you

[azleon]

Is this a Dell system or does it have an intel chipset? There's an option on the BIOS that it's suppoused to improve the harddrive performance, but if you're doing a OS reinstallation you could get an BSOD (0x0000007b I think)

Try to contact the manufacturer to disable that option, after the OS reinstallation, update the chipset so the BIOS settings will be back to normal

[alant092]

hey, its an HP laptop, the model is HP 6735s. Do you have any more information on what I need to contact the manufature about as I am not quite sure what to ask for?

thank you

[TerryNet]

With your symptoms my first thought would also be a hard drive defect. But now that you are working with a new drive that becomes lower on the suspect list.

Another possibility for a somewhat random error is memory. Suggest you run a memory test, such as Memtest86+

I'd also be worried about a motherboard or bus (to which the drive is connected) defect, but that would be way over my head.

[catoumi]

I am sure you re right TerryNet, did have a very similar problem with a HP laptop telling me while doing a clean install that this and that fille canot be found etc.....it turned out to be a faulty RAM ,,,so yes memtest86 is the best advice.