Slow Startup, Missing Recovery Partition, and hal.dll error

[atoth22]

I am helping my sister with her computer, so i do not know the history
of it. It is a laptop with Windows XP Home on it. She complained
that it was taking a long time to boot and that it was running really
slow. When I first looked at it, it would take about 10 - 15 minutes
to boot to windows. It would take a while on the screen that shows
the progress bar at the bottom and then it would take a while on the
screen that says Windows XP. I tried booting into safe mode to see if
that was any faster. It wasn't. It took just as long. During one of
the boots, it locked up or I assume it did because it didn't load for
over an hour. I hard reset it.

This time I got the following error <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

I rebooted the machine and got the error again. Then the second time
I rebooted, I got the same error but instead of hal.dll, it said
ntoskrnl.exe.

I have read the solutions to fix these problems using the windows
recovery console. I do not have an XP disk, so I can't do that.

The next time I rebooted, it booted into windows as it was before. It
took about 10 minutes, but it booted and the computer worked fine. It
is still slow. I opened the boot.ini file to see if it was
corrupted. I do not have the knowledge to tell, but I did notice that
it was booting off partition 2. This was odd to me because the
computer only has a C drive with the D: drive being the DVD drive. I
looked up her computer model online and it is supposed to have a D:
partition with the recovery files on it. This leads me to believe
that all of these issues are connected. Should the boot.ini reference
that other partition. Here is what the boot file says:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home
Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /PAE

Thanks for your help

 

[monty1945]

On a Win 98 SE, I had to use the startup diskette to do a sys C: on
it, and that kind of problem sounds like what you are encountering.
If she has a floppy drive on her computer, you can download the 6
startup diskettes for XP and see what you can do with them. You should
ask if she has maintained this computer properly, doing defrags, virus
scans, and malware scans on a regular basis. Also, I noticed that on
youtube.com you will find videos that address Windows XP startup
issues.

 

[atoth22]

She had a virus scanner spyware software on it. I don't know the last
time it was used. I uninstalled them and installed spybot and
symantec antivirus. Spybot caught some stuff but it didn't speed it
up. I am running a virus check right now but it hasn't caught
anything yet.

 

[monty1945]

A relative's laptop had a huge amount of "bloatware" on it, but it was
always slow, it didn't just slow down over time. Have you used
msconfig to turn off un-necessary programs? Again, there are videos
about this on youtube. However, it sounds to me like an issue for the
startup diskettes, and without them (or the XP recovery CD), there
might not be much you can do.