Laptop problems please help?

Question

I have been trying to fix my daughters laptop again and this time with no luck.

It has come up with two different things here are the two things that have come up tonight while I have been working on it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

XP didn't find any hard disk drive installed on your computer. Make sure your hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer and that any related hard drive configuration is correct

Other thing that came up while working on it said

WIndows could not restart because the following file is missing or corrupt <windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe

Please reinstall a copy of the above file.

What does the first one mean? Can anyone tell me how to check and fix it and also on the second part where would I find this file to intall it again.

Thanks

Answer 1

Get into the BIOS and see if the hard drive is recognized, re install windows if windows does not install the hard drive is failing.you need to replace it sorry for the bad news. you only allowed to curse at me three times more than that I get mad.

Answer 2

Insert your Xp disk into the CD drive, choose the boot from command prompt option in the menu that you are presented with

At the command prompt, type in the following:

copy d:\I386\Driver.cab c:\system32\ntoskrnl.exe /v

where d is the letter of your cd drive

press enter

Take the CD out when verified and reboot your computer

Answer 3

Your 2 problems are of different causes

1) your hard drive MBR Master Boot Record is corrupt or missing

Solution Download &quot; Hirens Boot cd &quot; burn to disk and boot from it

This CD has various options on it one is to fix the MBR read instruction carefully

This CD has many other useful programs as well I would not be without it

2) Your System files are mucked up I do not believe you can fix them in safe mode you will have to boot from Win CD and when asked what you want to do install etc press the R key for repair and follow instructions from there

Your computer should now run OK