Drive letters change on power up -Windows XP PC +bootup doesn't wo

I thought I had fixed an error message that stated cannot find hal.dll ....

I edited the boot.ini and got it to boot up. Then I turned off the PC and
when I turned it on it would not boot up. This time the I got a "NTLDR is
missing".

I used a Win XP CD and chose the recovery mode. Then I checked the different
drives and noticed that the drive letters had changed. The drive which had
been C was now D, and drive E was not F.

I have not changed any configuration. I have been moving a lot of data
docs/files and folders from one drive to another in my attempt to clean up my
data that is scattered all over different drives, with a lot of dups etc..

I tried to access boot.ini to edit it but could not find a way. I then
rebooted to see if there was something that was wrong on the BIOS
configuration. I went into the BIOS settings and noticed that one of the
original drives was missing, and could not get the BIOS to recognize it even
after I hit the discover option ...

My question is why are the drive letters changing on their own?

Also why is one of the drives just dropping out and cannot be seen by the
BIOS? This was later repeated with another drive. Could it be the motherboard
is going bad?

Thanks for any light you can shed on this problem, and any help you can give
me.

TedM

"TedM" wrote in message
...
I thought I had fixed an error message that stated cannot find hal.dll ....

I edited the boot.ini and got it to boot up. Then I turned off the PC and
when I turned it on it would not boot up. This time the I got a "NTLDR is
missing".

I used a Win XP CD and chose the recovery mode. Then I checked the
different
drives and noticed that the drive letters had changed. The drive which had
been C was now D, and drive E was not F.

I have not changed any configuration. I have been moving a lot of data
docs/files and folders from one drive to another in my attempt to clean up
my
data that is scattered all over different drives, with a lot of dups etc..

I tried to access boot.ini to edit it but could not find a way. I then
rebooted to see if there was something that was wrong on the BIOS
configuration. I went into the BIOS settings and noticed that one of the
original drives was missing, and could not get the BIOS to recognize it
even
after I hit the discover option ...

My question is why are the drive letters changing on their own?

Also why is one of the drives just dropping out and cannot be seen by the
BIOS? This was later repeated with another drive. Could it be the
motherboard
is going bad?

Thanks for any light you can shed on this problem, and any help you can
give
me.

TedM

I suggest you resolve the BIOS/disk problem first by asking for help in a
hardware newsgroup. After this is sorted out, come back here for help with
the Windows issue.