major XP boot up problem

[stefan099]

hi

my brothers PC encountered a problem the other day, when you boot it up it gets as far as the XP loading screen before it says that you cant access the login screen because it cant find shell32.dll and msgina.dll.

i'm not sure what he did to it, i think he was installing a game and it crashed.

i've tried using the original XP disk and botting it up with that in but it wont load up in the recovery mode. i've also tried booting in safe mode, restoring back to previous settings and even downloading the files needed to create an XP boot up disk but i cant get it to work.

i could proberly fix it if i could get to the recovery mode but it wont do that.

can any one help please

[cmptrgydv]

why won't it go in to recovery console

[stefan099]

i dont know

i'm assuming you just restart with the disk in and it should go straight to the start up menu ?

[cmptrgydv]

do you have the bios set to boot from cdrom first?

[stefan099]

Quote:

Originally Posted by cmptrgydv

do you have the bios set to boot from cdrom first?

i'm not sure how do you do that ?

[cmptrgydv]

when you start the computer, hit the delete button,

it will go in to the bios, setup, then you can set the first boot device,

what kind of computer is it,

[stefan099]

thanks i'll try that in a moment

its my old computer that was built for me by my dads friend, it still not bad with pentium 4 and an nvidia graphics card

[stefan099]

i've got onto the recovery console

now using some information i've found on these forums i'll see if i can fix it

[stefan099]

right i've made progress

i've followed this method

1. Boot to Recovery Console.

2 . type the following commands
cd system32 [enter]

ren winlogon.exe winlogon.old
ren msgina.dll msgina.old
ren shell32.dll shell32.old
ren shlwapi.dll shlwapi.old

cd.. [enter]
cd servicepackfiles\i386 [enter]
copy MSGINA.DLL c:\windows\system32
copy SHELL32.DLL c:\windows\system32
copy WINLOGON.EXE c:\windows\system32
copy shlwapi.dll c:\windows\system32

if not there, expand from the cd

3 Type EXIT and hit enter

however i've had another problem
when entering ren shell32.dll shell.old it cant find it
but i continued

now when i entered cd servicepackfiles\i386 it says it cant find the directory

am i doing something wrong here ? i'm using the original XP disk

[cmptrgydv]

where did you get that info from,you need to expand the i386 folder,
so it will look in the folder,

so it would look like this

i386\shell32.dll