Hal.dll error not letting me boot up.

Back story:

I was updating my Adobe Flash when the house power "blinked" and my computer turned off. When I turned the computer back on I got the Hal.dll missing/corrupt error and the computer would not boot even in safe mode.

I have a spare drive with XP loaded and I booted that drive using my un-bootable drive as a slave. I tried to just copy a new Hal.dll file over, but when I tried I couldn't access the windows folder in the slave drive. It kept giving me an error. I then tried to use recovery console and run bootcfg /rebuild, but I got an error stating that it can't find the windows installation.

I am able to access all my files and folders, except the windows folder, when I ran the troubled drive as a slave so I think it's still ok. Tried doing a repair through RC but I didn't get "repair" as an option. I noticed when I use RC that I get "C:\" instead of "C:\WINDOWS". I ran chkdsk /r and no errors show. When I tried typing C:\>cd windows, I got "the system cannot find the file or directory specified"

Another note that might be helpful, when I accessed my un-bootable drive as a slave this morning I noticed I no longer had my "Windows" folder. Yesterday it was there but not accessible and today it was gone. Any thoughts? I really don't want to do a clean install if possible.

 

It's probably too late, but have you tried to simply boot into 'Last Known Good Configuration'?

Regarding Repair Installation; when you boot with the install disk, you don't use the first 'R', which will give you the Recovery Console. You should continue to do an install, and after that you will get a second 'R' choice, which will do the Repair Install.

 

Thanks for the reply. Knew about the second "R" but all I get are my partitions of where it wants to install a new XP, no option for repair.

As for the "last known good configuration", no. I'll have to look into how to do that. Hopefully it's not too late for that.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307852 - unfortunately it looks like it may not help with missing/corrupt dll files.

 

Thanks for all of the help. As everyone suspected, I ended up having to reinstall. Mods, you can close the thread. Thanks again