corrupt or missing hal.dll

[Justin Burton]

i recently installed xp on a friends computer and now its
giving me an error message upon startup that says:
corrupt or missing hal.dll please reinstall this file.....
I did not upgrade, i performed a clean install w/sp2. Can
anyone help me with this problem? could i use the recovery
console to replace this file? or do i need to reinstall
considering its the hal? Thanks

 

[Steve Bruce, mct]

One soluton would be to perform and "inplace upgrade" it will save your
current configuration and reinstall the HAL - but also over-write your
patches if you have installed any patches.

boot into CD. On the first repair option, select Setup, dont select
repair.

after a few seconds it will give more options including repair. This time
select repair. It will run to conclusion and all your work will still be
inplace.

This works for moving installation to foreign hardware with ghost or moving
hard drives too.

 

[yweiss]

I just had this problem on a Dell laptop. I booted up from a CD
(Repair, Console). Found that Boot.ini was missing. I took it from
another computer and copied it (after modifying the partion number
from 1 to 2 since Dell computers contain a diagnostic partition on
partition 1, the OS is on partition 2) and it booted fine. I still
have no idea why the file was missing to begin with. If you have no
(blank)Administrator password use a Win2K CD to boot the computer.
Yosi

 

[Alex Nichol]

i recently installed xp on a friends computer and now its
giving me an error message upon startup that says:
corrupt or missing hal.dll please reinstall this file.....
I did not upgrade, i performed a clean install w/sp2.

That message is rather misleading. It happens because the boot.ini file
that tells the boot where to look for 'Windows' is damaged, so it is
looking for files in the wrong place - hal.dll just happens to be the
first one it looks for.

Given a 'proper' XP CD, not a makers recovery only one, Set the BIOS to
boot CD before Hard Disk. Boot the XP CD and, instead of Setup, take
the immediate R for Repair. Assume any password requested is blank, and
TAB over.

Use
Attrib -H -R -S C:\boot,ini
DEL C:\boot.ini
to delete the bad one
BootCfg /Rebuild

to search for Windows installations and make a new one