I have been working with a hotel property that is using a PC to handle all of their phone system, call accounting, key cards, etc... We setup these machines to interface with the aforementioned systems all daily and I have run into an issue that continues to confuse me and my coworkers...
This computer was running properly for a little over a week and it then crashed. The initial error was that Windows couldn't boot due to the fact that NTLoader.dll was missing or corrupt. Instead of extensively checking to make sure there wasn't a rootkit installed or a virus to the bootsector we reinstalled the DLL and got the machine running again...
Following week the machine crashed again, same missing DLL, and we had the property buy a brand new HDD. The new HDD worked for a week and somehow crashed again with the same problem! Most recently the DLL that was missing on the crash this week was HALL.DLL and not NTLOADER.DLL.
My Question: How can an NTLoader.DLL corrupt two completely different HDD's even when the XP cd we are using has worked succesfully recently on other computers?
The only things that have remained the same during this whole process are the IP address of the machine & a PCI card that adds two COM Ports (HALL.DLL is a hardware library).