Booting Problems
 

It seems that recently my computer has problems booting up and after a few tries its gets running, however today my computer won't boot up at all. When it first started happening I found out that it was sometimes because a disc was left in the in the disc drive. This time however nothing in the drive.

I've unplugged cables and what not as that sometimes seems to get it going but not this time. Could my DVD drive be broken or is it another sort of hardware problem? Hard drives maybe?

Another related problem is that I almost had it booted up then an error message came up saying "windows is missing hal.dll".

I'm running WinXp, 1gb Ram, Abit nforce mobo with AMD processor.

Oh no. That sounds very much like your HDD has gotten corrupted. I had this happen to a while back, HDD managed to sort itself out though. There is a way to restore it though, if you have your XP disc.

If that doesn't work, I'm afraid you're going to have to re-install windows.

There are a couple of other alternative ways to recover a damaged/missing HAL library listed here.

Now I'd love to be able to get as far as using the windows disc. Unforunatley as stated in my previous post my computer doesn't even boot up that far and switches off after about 10 seconds. However the processor fan and GFX fan keep on spinning as well as my power button light which still stays lit.

Thanks for the help so far guys but any suggestions for my other problem?

edit: on closer inspection it seems as if the fan on the motherboard doesn't spin on startup, although the LED on the mobo still lights up, this couldn't be a mobo problem could it?

So it doesn't actually turn off, but goes into standby mode?
Is the fan for the processor connected to the motherboard? It could just be that the fan has ceased to exist and that you need a new one, have you got another fan that you could try?

How long have you had this set-up?

You better check the harddrive with some tools from your HD vendor. Because if you have some bad blocks and you simply reinstall the system then it's going to happen again in the next time.
NTFS doesn't create corrupt files out of nowhere.

I've had it for about 18 months and not a problem. Its the mobo fan not the processor fan that stops spinning and it is connected. As for Standby mode I'm not sure, when it boots up I can hear everything starting to work then it all just cuts out, it just happens that the processor and GFX fan still spin as well as the power button still being lit.

Try a setup with another motherboard and see if it still happens.

If it does, it might be your hard disk or RAM. If it does not, it may be your power supply or motherboard.

Someone else I know has said that the fan that doesn't work, which cover the mobo chip is causing the computer to overheat. So I've just got to get a fan from somewhere.