Hal.dll missing or corrupt - will not boot

Hello Chaps,

As above, I'm having a spot of bother.

My PC: XP Professional, Pentium4 1.9 Ghz, 1024 Ram, Matrox RT2500 Video Card, Nvideo G450 dual monitor graphics card. 2 Hard drives (80Gig each I think).

I use it for video editing and it's been in storage for a while - just put it back together - 1st time it booted OK, 2nd time and every time since I get the Hal.dll missing or corrupt message.

As per other posts/ sites tried the following first:

1 Insert and boot from your WindowsXP CD. (worked OK)

2 At the first R=Repair option, press the R key (Fine)

3 Press the number that corresponds to the correct location for the installation of Windows you want to repair. (Gave me no option to do so and no administrator password prompting)

4 Type bootcfg /list to show the current entries in the BOOT.INI file (Came up "no entries found")

5 Type bootcfg /rebuild to repair it (came up "failed to successfully scan disks - could be file system error etc")

6 Take out the CD ROM and type exit

I ran CHKDSK and it said volume appears to be OK. Haven't yet run CHKDSK fully as I'm not sure what p, r, x etc stand for and I don't want to wipe anything.

I don't want to have to reinstall and lose all data.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance

Jeff Brown

 

what happens when you boot up with a DOS disk? Can you see your files? You made one with windows, right?

Might try copying a fresh boot.ini onto your boot disc.

A little advice though, whatever you do, do NOT use fixboot or fixmbr they will only make things worse.

 

Pyrate,

No I don't have a DOS disk - never got round to making one - regretting it now.

I ran chkdsk and seem to have "some unrecoverable problems" (dust/scratches?)

As I have a second hard drive is it possible to install a new copy of XP on that in order to then look at and salvage things from my c drive? If so how do you do that?

Cheers

Jeff

 

you could install on the other drive, then make the old (non-working) drive slave, and try to read it that way, to salvage your files...


do you have it setup for dual boot? i read that this is a common problem (missing hal.dll) for dual boot systems.

 

Google link to missing, or corrupt, hal.dll. May help, Bazza

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=&num=20&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=hal.dll&as_oq=missing+corrupt&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&safe=images

 

Nice link bazza.

Missing HAL.dll is a boot.ini issue. Please post a copy of your boot.ini.

You can get a copy by booting into the recovery console and entering the following

type boot.ini <---- If the boot.ini is present the contenets will display on your screen

copy c:\boot.ini a: <---- This will copy the boot.ini to floppy

Post the boot.ini in your next post.

 

Google to the rescue, again. Bazza

===

 

Chaps,

the smoking gun - how do I find out if it's a dual boot system? (please bear with me I know nothing about dos and all this set up malarky!)

Shadow_Puter_dude - I'm unable to get a copy of the boot.ini - it says command not recognised. When I try bootcfg /list it says no entries available.

I think it's a damaged hard drive problem - when I exit recovery console the message "error sensing primary hard drive disk" comes up.

Also, in setup when I looked at boot sequence "option 2 hard disk drive" had (not installed) written next to it and I'm assuming that's not good.

I've done the google thing and followed some of the steps (as per my first post) but that hasn't helped. I'm concerned that I might lose all my existing files if I do things I know nothing about.

I'm considering removing the c drive and putting it in anopther xp pc as slave to examine and do a repair as per
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm

Is that a good idea? Any other suggestions?

Cheers
Jeff

 

If you had a dual boot system you'd know.

Your boot.ini should look like this one

Unless you have a hidden recovery partion then it should look like this one

First thing to try is this command from the recovery console

bootcfg /rebuild
​

If that doesn't rebuild the boot.ini for your computer; copy the contents of the first quote box to a floppy, and issue this command for the recovery console:

copy a:\boot.ini c:
​

 

Well it's worse than I thought...

I took the hard drive out and switched it as a slave in another xp machine. Basically the drive is shot, numerous unreadables sections etc so the hal.dll was probably just the first file that was buggered with many more beyond!

Fortunately the second drive is intact and contains most of the video I wanted to salvage.

I've downloaded a dos ntfs reader utility to see if there's anything I can rescue then I'll be off to the shops...

Thanks for all your help on this one chaps!

Cheers

Jeff

 

Hey guys, new to this forum, hope I can be of some assistance as well as receive some assistance . I would check out this link
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm
It might be of some help to you.