Hi all,
I recently took 1 of the 2 512 MB RAMs from this old Dell GX280 desktop thats been sitting around for a few months gathering dust. The computer hasnt been turned on in a while and after I removed the RAM I just wanted to power it on to see if it still works, and to my surprise, it didnt start and gave me the following error message:
C:\windows\system32\hal.dl
l is missing or corrupt.
I immediately used my XP installation to disk to boot into the repair mode and tried doing a directory listing of the C: or windows drive on my hard disk. The "dir" command failed saying it is unable to list the directory listing at this time.
I also tried to reinstall windows on top of the old installation but the XP disk didnt recognize the hard drive as being formatted. I obviously didnt want to reformat and lose the data.
I instead ran chkdsk /r which finished after what seemed like aeons and said it found and fixed some errors.
After this, XP starts and fails with the following error message:
/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/S
YSTEM file is corrupt or missing
I tried doing last known configuration that worked, but to no avail. So F8 supposedly works.
Can someone tell me whats going on? Is the hard drive corrupt beyond repair or does it seem like a few bad sector near the MBR?
And more importantly did this happen because I removed the RAM? this seems unlikely. So I tried putting back the RAM back into the computer and tried swapping the positions of the 2 RAMs, but nothing worked. I even tried swapping the hard disk to a new machine and it still gives me the same missing system file error.
any help on this will be greatly appreciated...
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