hal.dll

please see here
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314477

Have you considered formatting the system?

Ha...just trying to keep it light!

if that's not working, here is another solution, but it's quite radical actually...

quote:
I found the fix to this problem. 1. It is the corruption of the boot.ini file. 2. To fix it, I did a parallel install of XP to create a new boot.ini file and get access to the PC. 3. I have seen references to booting off of the XP CD-ROM and this works by going to setup and then selecting "Repair". This only works however when the setup program actually sees the installation to repair. In my case it did not, so I did the paralleled install. 4. Using the paralleled install, I modified the boot.ini file so that it would boot off of my old installation and not the new one. This is done by change the reference for the [boot loader] section to refer to the original install folder. In my case, the big issue was that the boot.ini was corrupted by a program called BOOTXP and it was not referring to the correct partition. 5. The only down side is that I had to reactivate XP. After all of this, I am back in business and no thanks to MS Support. They were not sure what to do. If you want info. on how to delete the paralleled install, let me know. Hope this helps.

which is what my link says LOL

how did that happen :-)
in that case I'd check the link provided by stevenlewis.

cheers

to Neil_McIntyre, i tried editing the boot.ini and what i've found that it was empty! and also win.ini is empty! i wrote some stuff in the boot.ini which i think is correct. but still doesn't work!

Did you check the link I posted? it covers this pretty well

If the error you get is that the following file is missing or corrupt "hal.dll"
and windows can't find the file in <windows root>\system32

Then you can solve it by installing XP on another hard disk, put your old disk as slave and copy the new hal.dll to the same directory on your old disk.

Since this is only your hardware abstraction layer, this doesn't change anything to your data.

I hope this is a solution to your problem.

thX jack hageman
i posted this problem in August :)
but really thX
:)

i got the same corrupt "hal.dll" but it had to do with

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
reading something like...
signature(s234894)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

i find it easiest to fix these problems by just making the hard drive a slave to an existing computer and you can find and edit F:\boot.ini (make under tools and folder options that you don't have the "hide protected operating system files" checked) with the ease of XP and notepad (not a big fan of DOS (never learned))

GO TO POPULARTOOLZ IT HAS LINKS TO YOU WOULDNT BELIEVE THIS WINXP CORP WITH IT YOU DONT HAVE TO HAVE IT REGISTERED WHEN YOU EXCEED THE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF HARDWARE DEVICE CHANGES. ALSO THERE ARE A COUPLE OF FILES WPA.DBL AND WPA.BAK
IF YOU COPY THEM TO A FLOPPY EVEN FROM ANOTHER MACHINE AND THEN TO YOUR WIN DIRECTORY WILL DEFEAT THE TOTALLY USELESS ACTIVATION INCONVENIENCE.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/activation_workaround.htm. STEP BY STEP PROCEDURE.
GET TO KNOW YOUR RECOVERY CONSOLE IT MAY APPEAR TO BE DAUNTING BUT NO PAIN NO GAIN. ALSO GET YOURSELF A COPY OF HIREN'S BOOTCD & BARTS PE WHICH ALLOWS YOU TO BOOT INTO WINXP SO YOU CAN ATTEMPT TO REPAIR YOUR INSTALLED OS.
 I NORMALLY DONT POST SO CONSIDER YOURSELF LUCKY.

To fix this you only have to boot with windows install cd and go to the recovery console, then do chkdsk /p /r, wait until it finishes and reboot. It should work fine.