missing hal.dll: no recovery CD

Hi All - we have a computer at our Historical Society that was donated. It crashed with the 'missing hal.dll' error, but the computer did not come with its original CDs. I tried a couple of other XP CD's I had lying around to see if I could get into recovery mode, but no luck.

Recovery would be great, but if it is not easily done I am also content with a means that will let me back the data up to an external HD and be done with it. Then, of course, find a means that will prevent our librarians from storing their databases on 12 year old hard drives (*that* is a tough nut to crack!) I've gotten out to a DOS prompt at some point, but USBs were not recognized.

Thanks!

Kathy

 

Greetings, kciuci...

You might try burning and booting to the XP Recovery console image, but I've got a feeling that may not work if you've already unsuccessfully tried grabbing hal.dll from other XP disks...

Transferring the data should be relatively painless, but I imagine it's going to be tough firing up an external drive if the OS is dead. Probably the easiest way is to pull the hard drive, slave the drive in another machine and copy the files...