OK, here's my problem, a few months back I started having problems with iTunes (my PC would BSoD and restart itself when I tried to open it) shortly after updating to iTunes 6. It was annoying but I managed to get along without it.

Fast forward to Saturday night, I get back from work and power up my PC, it boots normally, gets to the Windows XP loading screen and then blue screens and resarts (it did this about 3 times). I booted again and it worked fine, up until the point when it restarted itself with no warning whatsoever. When it started up again it decided to go through disk checking, which I let it do, and it found and deleted a load of files, so when I eventually got into windows again, I got nothing but a black screen and my cursor. I tried Ctrl+Alt+Del and got the task manager up, but every program I tried to run either froze up or wouldnt start at all. I got extremely annoyed and turned it off, went to my parents PC and searched the internet for help.

About an hour later I go back to my PC and try again, this time getting nothing but a black screen and a message saying:

'The Application or DLL C:\WINDOWS\system32\NCObjAPI.DLL is not a valid Windows image please check this against your installation diskette.'

So I think "OK, there's no way I'm getting my work back, might as well start fresh", so I boot from the CD, only to find that Windows thinks I haven't got a hard drive. Any ideas?

Sorry about the length of the post, but I didn't want to leave anything out.

My system:
Windows XP Professional
Gigabyte GA 7N400 Pro2
AMD Athlon XP3000+
160GB Serial ATA Maxtor DiamondMax Hard Drive
1024MB OCZ Platinum RAM

Thanks in advance.

can you boot to look at the BIOS screen to see if your hard drive is being recognized.
can you boot into safe mode

Yep, the BIOS knows its there, just windows tells me i havent got one installed ... i did manage to boot in safe mode before I got the black screens but I used the RAID config to format the drive to try and install from scratch and it still didn't work. Now I can't boot in safe mode.

How many hard drives have you got?

Just the one. The RAID thing is jsut built in w/ the mobo.

Can we clarify the current situation:

You mention Windows says you haven't a hard drive and yet you mention trying Safe Mode etc.

You also mention trying to reinstall XP from CD.

Where and what is the exact indication that the hard drive is not detected?

What happens when you try a clean install booting the CD?

Do you have the RAID drivers for the F6 prompt?

Do you even get that far?

Have you run a bootable diagnostic on your hard drive? (The manufacturer will have this on their web site).

OK, problem solved, bought a new hard drive and works fine. Old hard drive is screwed beyond repair. Thnx for the help.

Thanks for the update and the thanks!

Let us know if we can help further in the future!




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