Hard drive problem/question

[Geoff Fox]

My dad's computer stopped in the midst of rebooting with a hal.dll
error (Windows could not start because the following file is missing or
corrupt). I went to look a little deeper, using the recovery console,
I could not read C: and got an error (An error occurred during
directory enumeration).

OK, I thought - I'll do in in place reinstall.

I stopped when Windows reported the three partitions all with nearly
100% free space (everything free less 1 mb per partition).

Now I'm thinking the problem might not be that hal.dll is missing, but
that something... some pointer on the disk drive has gone bad... or
maybe the drive itself.

Before I do something drastic and lose all his data, does anyone have a
suggestion?

Geoff Fox

 

[William the Wombat]

My dad's computer stopped in the midst of rebooting with a hal.dll
error (Windows could not start because the following file is missing or
corrupt). I went to look a little deeper, using the recovery console,
I could not read C: and got an error (An error occurred during
directory enumeration).

OK, I thought - I'll do in in place reinstall.

I stopped when Windows reported the three partitions all with nearly
100% free space (everything free less 1 mb per partition).

Now I'm thinking the problem might not be that hal.dll is missing, but
that something... some pointer on the disk drive has gone bad... or
maybe the drive itself.

Before I do something drastic and lose all his data, does anyone have a
suggestion?

I got this hal.dll error recently when installing a new (SATA) drive. Using
Acronis I copied over my bootable C partition onto it and tried to boot from
it - and that gave the hal.dll error. I'm rather hazy about mbr s and
booting etc, but I presume that the error was caused by lack of a suitable
mbr. I seem to have bypassed that problem by installing windows on that
drive and then overwriting its C partition with the C partition from my old
HD. I should think there are many solutions to your problem. One might be to
put the drive in another machine (as primary slave or as either on secondary
ide channel) and possibly the data would be available once you boot up using
that machines boot drive. If not, suitable recovery software on that
machine, such as Acronis Recovery Expert, should be able to restore the
partitions again. You could also have a look at other threads here - "MBR /
bootsector / FAT wiped by FDISK - unreadable ! FINDPART (Mikkelsen)" looks
interesting.