Problem with booting a Gateway desktop.

[roym]

I recently bought a Gateway 580 GE desktop. P4 3.2g, 200Gb, 512 M. Windows XP Home. I never liked the disk partitions or the OS and so I formatted the hard disk and set it up with one Primary and two Logical partitions. I set up C: (Prim) 20Gb, D: 80Gb and E: 100Gb. I installed XP Pro and the program worked well but when I shut it down and came to start it again the next day, I got messages about missing ntldr and the computer would not boot. On a couple of occasions it did boot as if nothing was wrong and then it
would fail again. I copied ntldr and ntdetect.com from my CD to C:. I tried Chkdsk /r, Fixboot C:, fixmbr C: and also Bootcfg /rebuild After the Bootcfg /rebuild, the computer went into cycling - it would boot up to the Windows XP screen and then shut down and start again - over and over. So I then did a new installation of XP Pro on top of the last one after formatting C: with the long format method. The OS installed with no problem and I tried restarting 4 times and everything was perfect.
When I tried to boot today, I got a message that Windows cannot start because of a computer disk hardware problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. I tried again and this time it told me that Windows root/system 32/Hal.dll and ntoskrnl.exe were
missing.
I have tried to set boot priority in the BIOS but in the BIOS there are very few things that I am allowed by the system to change. On the Boot priority issue, all of the drives highlight and I cannot just select one.
I e-mailed Gateway and they were not wanting to help because I had changed their OS and partitions. They just said to try finding drivers on the internet but they never said which ones.
Please could somebody give me some help on this issue.
Many thanks.

[ski]

Make sure the HD's cables are securely seated.
If they're ok, then replace the IDE cable with a known working cable, and connect a different power lead to the HD.
If no luck, then reformat the HD, reinstall the O/S, and run the diagnostics at the HD manuf's site.

[roym]

Thanks Ski, I did that with the cables and now I'll go and do the diagnostics thing. I read something about information that is imbedded on the HD. I'm thinking that there's probably some information put on the HD before my C: drive by the Gateway people that was not removed by my format. Does this make any sense? I did the format with the XP pro installation CD.
I really appreciate your help!

[mjc]

The infomation that is embedded on drives, these days, is usually something to tie the restore set that comes with the computer to that computer and only that computer. Not even that is as common as it once was...

I would almost say that your problems are not OS/driver related but quite possibly a bad CMOS battery...

[roym]

Thanks mjc. I'll give this a try too. This is a bit of a strange one - I live in China and I bought this computer for a friend in America. We set up a remote desktop connection so that I could do all of the installs etc. and he just put in the CD's when I needed them. He's away until next Thursday so when he gets back I'll call him and ask him to check the battery.

[ski]

If you cannot reload the O/S, or reloading the O/S and replacing the CMOS battery do not get the system booted up, then you can install the HD as a Slave drive in another system to run diagnostics on it.

[roym]

Thanks Ski. I'll be trying all of this stuff over the 'phone when my buddy gets home on Thursday. I have no problem at all formatting, loading the OS again, even shutting down and restarting a couple of times and then all of a sudden..... strange messages. It's all just intermittent. MJC suggested changing the CMOS battery which we shall do, but I'm not that certain because the computer time has always been OK. Anyway, I'll shout in the results next week.
Thanks everyone!

[Erik]

Try testing the RAM while you are at it, might have a bad stick in there.