hi, could anyone help. i have been given an medion md96920 laptop which was pretty screwed up windows wise so i thought doing a system restore back to 2009 when the laptop was new would be a good idea. this completed successfully but there was an unknown password set so i used spotmau powesuite 2008 to get rid of the password but after rebooting the laptop will not boot past the windows splash screen then reboots. i have tried f8 safe mode, using windows vista disk to repair, spotmau disk to repair but nothing works. i could not do a restore back to factory settings either as when i press f10 a screen comes up with the following text
edit windows boot options for windows vista
path: windows\system\system32\winload.exe
partition: 1
hard disk: f571d657
[ /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN
ENTER=submit
Then the same thing happens it gets to the splash screen then reboots.
I also tried reinstalling vista using the product key on the base but got the message not a valid windows key.
Any help would be most appreciated.
Regards.
Just found out by using hirens boot cd that a file is missing at startup
<windows root>\system 32\ hal.dll
anyone know how to get this file back so windows will start please.
Regards.
Edited by pappagrump63 - 7/20/12 at 4:24am
