I'm lurking here because I'm trying to install Windows XP Pro and when
it finishes copying the files from the CD and reboots, it fails to do
so because of a corrupt WINDOWS\system32\l_intl.nls

I've found some helpful advice here. I tried going into recovery mode
and *copying* the file from the installation CD, but having read the
advice here, I'd say I need to *extract* it rather than copying it, so
I'm going to try that tomorrow. (I found that out from a link here into
the MicroSoft site.)

I don't think there's anything wrong with my hard drive, as I've
encountered a similar error on two! In fact, the old 17GB hard drive
was the more helpful of the two because it actually gave me this error
message. The new 300GB drive with a 20GB partition for WinXP just said
"Disk error" which really wasn't helpful at all.

It could be worth my while checking my cables, and one poster here even
said that replacing his DVD reader was helpful. That might be worth
looking into as my DVD reader used to read both commercial and home
burnt CDs, but now only reads the commercial ones, so it ain't what it
used to be.

I also saw on a forum elsewhere that someone with this message
installed WinXP into two partitions on their hard drive and it ran from
the second one!

I do have some more playing around to do yet, so unless you can see
anything obvious that I'm doing wrong, I don't need a reply just yet,
but I could be back tomorrow with more questions if I exhaust all the
possibilities to no avail.

Right now, having acquired an IDE card which enables me to run more
hard drives, I'm seriously thinking about forgetting the Windows XP
install and going for Windows 98 instead. That's what I've been using
for about the past 8 years on the PC, although I should add that a bit
over a year ago it had a *serious* upgrade and everything except the
floppy drive, DVD reader, CD burner, sound card, 17GB hard drive, and
possibly some re-used cabling is *not* from my original system. If only
Windows 98 didn't suffer from so much memory leakage, I'd turn a
permanently deaf ear to my other half's constant blandishments to
upgrade to XP, and stick with the devil I know. Right now I've almost
convinced myself that I'd rather live with a quirky 98 installation
than a totally dead PC, which is what I've got right now:-(

Helen

I would say you have a hardware problem in either the dvd drive or the ide
controller, possibly but less likely is a memory problem.

Good luck.

Toby
"HelenEdith" wrote:

Toby Widdows wrote:
Hello Toby

I could have sworn that I replied to this message this morning, but it
hasn't appeared on Google, so maybe I didn't post it properly. Being
without my news client is not fun:-(

I should be able to rule the DVD drive in our out as the cause of the
problem as I've got separate DVD reader and CD burner drives, and
although the burner drive is slower, it will also read CDs and I can
set the BIOS up to boot from that rather than the DVD drive. In fact, I
was doing that for a while yesterday, but can't recall whether I
installed to the 17GB drive from it before setting the BIOS back to
pointing to the DVD reader. I can try installing from the CD burner
again to rule out problems with reading the CD.

We've also got two legal copies of XP in our house, and I've tried both
CDs, although I don't think I've given the second CD a good enough test
yet, so there's some more testing I can do there.

I don't think the hard drive is the problem as I've used two different
hard drives.

My other half is all for upgrading my BIOS. I've got an Asus
motherboard which I bought a bit over a year ago. I also bought a new
processor and new memory at the same time, so all of those components
are pretty new, and have also been running Win98 for the past year or
more.

It could be worth trying different IDE cables, as they may have come
out of the PC I upgraded from last year and are therefore older.

I also still need to try to *extract* rather than *copy* the file that
the PC is complaining about. I've been in recovery mode, but just did a
copy of the file, and that's not what MicroSoft tell you to do, so I
need to go back and do that properly.

The other possibility is that there's a long-standing fault somewhere
in the system (possibly motherboard, memory or IDE cables) as I've had
three major Win98 corruption problems in the past year since upgrading
my PC. I've reinstalled Win98 each time and copied my data back, losing
a few files each time. My other half has been keen to blame Win98 or my
email client software (Turnpike 4.5) for these and is the prime mover
behind the upgrade to XP, but maybe Win98 wasn't at fault after all.
(As far as Turnpike is concerned, it wasn't running when the last
incident occurred, so I think it's innocent.)

I'm just about ready to reinstall Win98 and forget about XP, but I'd
prefer to have XP as it won't have the same memory leakage problems I'm
experiencing with 98, and also the last twice I've reinstalled, I
haven't been able to get remote desktopping to work, and my other half
is sick of me borrowing his XP computer when I work from home:-)

Helen

HelenEdith wrote:
I wouldn't bother extracting any file. That's something I did in win98
days when trying to err, dunno. install drivesr maybe. extracting them
from cab files. Never for installing an OS, and I haven't had that
issue for win xp. It needs a file on the CD (which it would be
already), or on the hard drive - which it shoudl be copied there
already. I don't think extracting will help. And trying that from the
recovery console would be too much pain.


CDs - checked
CD/DVD drive - unchecked (I suggest having 2 in there anyway)
HDDs - checked
IDE cables - unchecked
IDE connectors - unchecked
RAM - unchecked <--though not sure if that's cause the problem.

IDE cables are easy to check/try diff. Make sure you get 80 wire IDE
cable for the hard drive, not 40 wire.

For testing IDE connectors
You could try moving the CD drive and HDD onto the same IDE connector.
THen onto the other one (there are 2). See if it makes a difference.
This is more for diagnosis, whether you want to keep it like that is
another matter.

As mentioned, I suggest 2 CD/DVD drives anyway so easy to test that.

You could try diff RAM. If you have 2 sticks, then try with 1. Test.
Then try with other 1.

q_q_anonymous@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
It tells you how to do it in
http://support.microsoft.com/default...&Product=winxp
and suggests that as a second step in diagnosing the "*.nls Files
Missing or Corrupt" during startup. It isn't actually that difficult
when you've got a "cookbook" to follow.

I had a go before I'd read the article and I used the COPY command
where I should have used the EXTRACT command.

I don't hold out much hope of it working, as I'm leaning towards a
hardware issue.

Easy enough to check as I've got two.

My other half seems to know what to get. He also says that it's changed
and some of it's more modern, particularly the stuff that's made for
hanging up to 4 hard drives on. (I've just got an IDE card so that I
can expand the number of hard drives I run, so we'll be getting more
IDE cable anyway, so we just need to get an extra bit to substitute for
what's currently in there!)

No, I definitely wouldn't want to keep it that way, but it could be a
useful test.

I think there may be 2 sticks in it. I've got 1GB of RAM. I hope I can
get at it without having to move the whole case, as I really don't want
to have to undo all my external cables if I can help it. This PC has
been growing and spreading for about seven years now, and there are all
sorts of cables snaking around behind it! SCSI scanner, LapLink
parallel cable, a couple of other parallel cables, plus monitor, etc...

Helen

HelenEdith wrote:

ms link says it's problem with Starting windows rather than installing
windows. I guess install is completing, then it restarts, then it
screws up.
Since it's with starting windows, there's a good chance that extracting
and copying the file over will work.
have you tested the cd - if the CD you have works on other computers?

I think those IDE cards are usually IDE RAID cards with an option
(perhaps called by some JBOD-just a bunch of disks).
By the way. I just checked my notes regarding an IDE RAID card I tried.
It didn't work correctly when I used the standard IDE ports and the
ones on the card. I had to only use the ones on the card and disable
the standard ones in the BIOS. The RAID Card has its own BIOS.
The card had 2 connectors, so in numbers it was an improvement on the
MBRD ones, since on the old I had 2 connectors but needed 1 for the
CD/DVD drives.
It's not clean though. You have to mess with it, its own BIOS.

I'd be interested to know which IDE card you're buying.

the only thing I find that sometimes gets in the way is the cpu
heatsink.
nowadays I use a torch to ensure the ram goes in right. especially
important if cables are everywhere.

side note- and not meanign to create a prob that doesn't exist. but,
cables all over the case may mean the cpu gets a bit hot - not so good.
maybe your BIOS has a 'health' section to check cpu temp. Otherwise you
could easily check temp with some windows software.

q_q_anonymous@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
[snip]
I'd better give it a try. Both of the CDs were still sealed in their
cellophane bags when I first used them, so we haven't tested them on
other computers unless my other half did so today. He's building a
computer on the kitchen bench at present - tells me not to do any
cooking that will generate steam:-)

Stephen's research today suggests that maybe I need to remove my modem
(which is only in there for safe-keeping as I get my Internet via the
onboard network card these days) and my SCSI card as it could be lack
of drivers on those cards that are causing the Windows start-up to
fail. There may be a fallacy in that logic somewhere as it has to
Plug'n'play them eventually...

I can't find a brand name on the box, but it does say "made in Taiwan"
and it also clearly states that you can use it for expanding the number
of hard drives on your system. It doesn't mentione the word "RAID"
anywhere. My motherboard has the capability of running RAID. It's also
got slots for SATA drives. I was thinking that those had to be RAID,
but from rereading my motherboard manual last night, I don't think they
do. Anyway, we've got lots of IDE hard drives lying around, so
expanding the number of IDE drives I can run suits me. Ultimately, I
probably ought to get an external case that I can put a drive into and
when I fill it up, just take it offline and put another one in. And my
digital camera is *only* a 6MP model!!!

Funnily enough, Stephen's been doing the hard drive instals for me.
I've done a couple for myself, but he was volunteering:-) He keeps a
torch handy.

The cables are on the outside, not the inside. Behind my computer is a
regular spaghetti junction.

The motherboard does have some temperature information available via
the BIOS, and I think there ought to be a utility with it which I've
never loaded which gives me the option to look at that sort of data
from within Windows.

I suspect that I'm not going to progress my problems this evening. It's
already after 10pm and after sitting up late last night surfing for
information about my problem, I'm tired. It's even possible that I
won't make a concerted effort to solve it until the weekend. I don't
want to push myself past my limits, and as Stephen will kindly spin up
my hard drive (the one that came out of Win98 and has a few but
hopefully not too many corrupted files on it) in his PC, I can find my
camera club stuff that I need for later this week and so I'm not in a
huge rush to get my PC running. Of course, if I go out on a
photographic mission and download my SD cards to the Jobo Giga One and
fill that up and have nowhere else to put pictures, I'll soon change my
tune:-)

I'll post at the weekend if/when I've resolved the problem.

Helen

HelenEdith wrote:
Please do update,

I really don't want the whole shopping chat chat garbage though. My
interest is in the technical aspect here. Problems. Solutions.
Troubleshooting methods.

Nothing mundane

So save me from having to read-

"Both of the CDs were still sealed in their cellophane bags "

"we haven't tested them on
other computers unless my other half did so today. He's building a
computer on the kitchen bench at present - tells me not to do any
cooking that will generate steam:-)"

q_q_anonymous@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
I don't mean to appear rude. I'm just being to the point.

q_q_anonymous@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
[snip]
That's all right:-)

The long and the short of it appears to be that I needed to read my
Asus motherboard manual more closely. My other half read it and didn't
skip over the bit about RAID (which I'd skipped because I'm not using
RAID) and the manual clearly states that WinXP and Win2000
installations require you to have created a RAID driver floppy to use
during the installation. I expect we'll be creating that tonight. The
manual tells us how to do it.

So it does appear that the original error message can cover a multitude
of sins, and we're hopeful that we've found the right one this time!

If that doesn't do the trick, we'll start substituting memory and IDE
cables...

I'll update later. Might not be tonight, though.

Helen