hal.dll missing or corrupted

witchypoo

Hi
posting this from my laptop.
My old Windows XP computer the rest of the family uses just decided to not be bootable - the following message on attempting:
"windows could not start because the following is missing or corrupt:
<windowsroot.\system32\hal.dll.
please reinstall a copy of the above. "

Now I have spent over an hour after finding advice online to reboot from the Windows XP cd but my cd is SP1 and every time I try it is doing something, takes maybe 1 minute first attempt then says press f1 to retry or f2 to enter setup. I have changed the boot sequence to CD, I have even been into f12 and told it to boot from cd (think i did it right) but I never get past the initial attempt to boot. Now I do not know for sure whether my old CD drive works properly, I know one of the drives broke and we usually use the external CD rewriter via USB when we want to do anything using discs, but the PC is not recognizing it at this boot stage.

Can anyone advise me? I read its possible to make a slipstream SP3 disc or some such thing, but I cannot believe this is possible on a machine that will not boot.
I do not see how it is possible I can save files or even do a new install of XP if the blessed thing is like this.

gonzo127

probably the easiest thing to try first is to sort a linux livecd which will test if the cd drive is working and boot-able, also if it does boot it will give you the ability to back up your files so they are safe, then we could get around to fixing windows without the worry of wiping your hard drive

usual suggestions for the livecd would be one of the ubuntu's or linux mint

Richie-from-the-Boro

Depends .. .. as you would expect on what your problems are, and even you are not sure. There is one thing for certain that without a working CD/DVD you will never ever find out. It's likely that your aged machine can not even see a USB at DOS level. The HAL issue is not so difficult to fix but you will need to get your important stuff off first, then effect a repair or reinstall.

Try a different CD/DVD disk, if its no, go get a~n~other CD/DVD drive to work with at DOS level.

witchypoo

I like gonzo's suggestion and will look into that, to check up on my cd drive.

As for what the problem is, I know we only have one main partition which narrows it down a bit, the only other info I have is that last time it was used (on sunday or monday) my son was trying to listen to a music cd and it was taking an age to work so he gave up. He says he was not downloading anything.
Oh and thanks for the link - thats the same guy whose youtube tutorial was the first solution I found. Reading the site though, he says "The Windows 2000 and Windows XP CDs supplied by Microsoft have a tool called the Recovery Console" - I only have the SP1 disc supplied by Dell with Dell's own branding on. Is that the right one that I should be using? I feel I should have some recovery diskettes for XP as we did when we had win98 on our previous PC but a search through the shelves finds nothing.

Richie-from-the-Boro

witchypoo wrote: »

I like gonzo's suggestion and will look into that, to check up on my cd drive.

As for what the problem is, I know we only have one main partition which narrows it down a bit, the only other info I have is that last time it was used (on sunday or monday) my son was trying to listen to a music cd and it was taking an age to work so he gave up. He says he was not downloading anything.
Oh and thanks for the link - thats the same guy whose youtube tutorial was the first solution I found. Reading the site though, he says "The Windows 2000 and Windows XP CDs supplied by Microsoft have a tool called the Recovery Console" - I only have the SP1 disc supplied by Dell with Dell's own branding on. Is that the right one that I should be using? I feel I should have some recovery diskettes for XP as we did when we had win98 on our previous PC but a search through the shelves finds nothing.

- do you mean you son's music CD was in an IDE drive or a USB drive ?
- not the Microsoft XP CD, its all Microsoft CD's have a recovery console
- are you confident you have no ' hidden ' Dell System Restore" partition if its a DELL ?
- how old is the DELL and which [ model number ] DELL is it ?
- usually you hold down CTRL and start tapping F11 until the RESTORE COMPUTER screen appears
- if the hidden partition and the restore info is still there but you are unable to access it the ' DSRFix repair tool ' can work wonders

Note that this is a fully-destructive restore you will be back to the day you bought it. Any unsaved data will be lost. If you need to recover important stuff first - ask how to here.

witchypoo

Son's music cd was most likely in one of the internal IDE drives I would imagine although the USB external drive was plugged in.
Off the top of my head (in another room ready for sleep) it was bought 5 or 6 years ago and is a DELL Dimension 4600i with 512mb RAM.
I always assumed we had a recovery utility partition of some sort but as for visible lettered drives we had a C drive (A was floppy, which we paid extra for) D and E are CD-R drive and DVD drives. We never had an extra visible partition for software for example.
So I am pretty certain DELL put something on there but I had no clue as to how to access it, so thanks for that.
What I cannot do is get the flippin' CD to take me to the Recovery Console, or how to get to the point that I can enter commands.

I'll try the Ubuntu LiveCD thingy tomorrow at least then I will be able to determine if the CD-RW drive works. I've downloaded it to my laptop and will burn a disc in the morning. I assume if the drive works it will detect it and boot to the Ubunu desktop from it

candtalan

witchypoo wrote: »

I'll try the Ubuntu LiveCD thingy tomorrow at least then I will be able to determine if the CD-RW drive works. I've downloaded it to my laptop and will burn a disc in the morning. I assume if the drive works it will detect it and boot to the Ubunu desktop from it

If it boots, then at an early stage consider using the boot menu item in the ubuntu CD of:
'check the CD for errors' (or similar). To see this initila menu you press a key when you see some symbols at teh bottom of the display early in booting. The CD self check also uses the cd drive and a failed self check will cast suspicion onto the CD drive, (and in principle, also the CD of course).

witchypoo

It definitely tried to boot from the Ubuntu disc, it took quite a while whirring and clicking and then declared it a failure.

I did, however go into the Boot menu from f12 again and ran IDE Drive Diagnostics. I got the following if it means anything useful:

IDE Hard Drive Diagnostics running, please wait...
Primary SATA
Drive 0: No device
Secondary SATA
Drive 0: No device
Primary IDE
Drive 0: IC35L090AVV207-0 - Pass
Drive 1: No device
Secondary IDE:
Drive 0: HL-DT-STDVD-Rom GDR8162B Diagnostics not supported
Drive 1: HL-DT-ST GCE8483B Diagnostics not supported
Test complete, press <enter> to reboot

yes, I actually wrote it all down lol

At least it recognises the drives.
Is there any hope at all for my machine?
My hubby is really hacked off that he will lose all his stuff on there.

gonzo127

go into the boot menu and see if you can set an option to boot from USB, if you can, you can actually put Ubuntu on a USB stick and boot from that,

just reassure your hubby all is not lost, if all else fails you can take the hard drive out and connect it to another system as a slave or turn it into a external hard drive with a caddy which can be connected to another system via USB

enigma52

er where did it recognise the drive? looks like it is now a paperweight to me.

witchypoo

enigma52 wrote: »

er where did it recognise the drive? looks like it is now a paperweight to me.

er the Primary IDE is the hard drive. I also ran tests yesterday that declared it still exists. And also confirmed it has 80Gb.
The other two drives are the DVD and CD-RW drives.

Thanks gonzo that is good to know! So I could hook it to my laptop as an external drive and retrieve files at least?
cheers