boweasel
May 20th, 2010, 07:46 PM
Got one of those HP Mini notebooks without a CD drive.
XP got corrupted somehow, and my wife took it over to a friend's house along with the HP OS CD. Several days later she gets it back, and this guy (my wife's friend's husband) has installed Ubuntu onto the machine. No, offense, but my wife (it's really her PC) doesn't like Ubuntu, but this guy is my wife's boss and she doesn't want to make a lot of waves.
So I take over and use WinToFlash on the HP OS disk, to make a bootable flash drive.
When I booed off the flash drive, I STUPIDLY chose install and then REPAIR, thinking that we might still have all of her pictures, documents, etc...
Everything went swimmingly until I got to the welcome screen and was prompted for her password. I initially thought 'great', she hasn't lost anything....but when I entered her pw I got the msg box "The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted". I hit cntl/alt/del twice to get the Administrator sign-in, but get the same msg. None of the available F8 options semm to be able to get me past this roadblock.
Meanwhile, I CAN boot into Ubuntu, but I have no idea how to reformat the drive from Ubuntu, figuring tht if I reformat and reinstall using the flash drive, the domain msg will go away.
So I'm unable to get to a command prompt in XP, and can't seem to figure out what to do in Ubuntu to reformat (we have no Ubuntu disk - only the HP XP OS disk).
When I boot using the flash drive, I get a screen with 2 options:
1st, text mode setup (Boot from flash after finished).
2nd, GUI mode setup, continue setup + ist start of windows
Initially I chose option 1 where I ultimately chose install and repair. If I chose option 1 now I get a DOS msg "Windows could not start because the following is missing or corrupt: hal.dll. Please reinstall a copy of the above file." Of course I don't know how to reinstall a copy of the file, since I can't get to a prompt.
If I choose option 2, I get to the Windows signon screen, where I get the "The specified domain either does not exist..." msg.
I am stumped. But good.
XP got corrupted somehow, and my wife took it over to a friend's house along with the HP OS CD. Several days later she gets it back, and this guy (my wife's friend's husband) has installed Ubuntu onto the machine. No, offense, but my wife (it's really her PC) doesn't like Ubuntu, but this guy is my wife's boss and she doesn't want to make a lot of waves.
So I take over and use WinToFlash on the HP OS disk, to make a bootable flash drive.
When I booed off the flash drive, I STUPIDLY chose install and then REPAIR, thinking that we might still have all of her pictures, documents, etc...
Everything went swimmingly until I got to the welcome screen and was prompted for her password. I initially thought 'great', she hasn't lost anything....but when I entered her pw I got the msg box "The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted". I hit cntl/alt/del twice to get the Administrator sign-in, but get the same msg. None of the available F8 options semm to be able to get me past this roadblock.
Meanwhile, I CAN boot into Ubuntu, but I have no idea how to reformat the drive from Ubuntu, figuring tht if I reformat and reinstall using the flash drive, the domain msg will go away.
So I'm unable to get to a command prompt in XP, and can't seem to figure out what to do in Ubuntu to reformat (we have no Ubuntu disk - only the HP XP OS disk).
When I boot using the flash drive, I get a screen with 2 options:
1st, text mode setup (Boot from flash after finished).
2nd, GUI mode setup, continue setup + ist start of windows
Initially I chose option 1 where I ultimately chose install and repair. If I chose option 1 now I get a DOS msg "Windows could not start because the following is missing or corrupt: hal.dll. Please reinstall a copy of the above file." Of course I don't know how to reinstall a copy of the file, since I can't get to a prompt.
If I choose option 2, I get to the Windows signon screen, where I get the "The specified domain either does not exist..." msg.
I am stumped. But good.