hal.dll missing or corrupted

closed

Could you clarify, this machine has


1 internal DVD drive
1 internal CD drive
1 external usb cd or DVD drive
no floppy drive

and if so, which of these drives are you trying to boot from?

Does the F12 boot menu support usb booting?

is the xp disc clean
no safe mode options work?
Have you unplugged the external drive while trying to boot (and printers etc if connected)

If you know one of the internal drives is faulty, you may as well disconnect it or disable it in the bios

witchypoo

1 internal DVD drive which works and which is the only one which responds to boot attempts (light comes on and is 'working', makes reading noises for over a minute before giving up).
1 internal CD drive not working (boot attempt gives up immediately)
1 external usb cd or DVD drive (not recognised at boot setup)
1 floppy drive but no means to create a floppy to boot from

f12 does not have usb booting option, have even been into boot sequence settings and checked there.
The xp disc is clean. Cannot boot to safe mode or anything, nor boot to 'last working version'.
Has a brief boot.ini file message before the hal.dll message appears.
Have only unplugged the external drive, it's just there for convenience when needing to write to disc. Is it a possibility the printer would affect booting? If so I will unplug it. however it does not show as hardware at this stage.

witchypoo

OK I unplugged the printer and it did not help unfortunately.

edit:
Um perhaps it does not like the Ubuntu disc because I only run 512mb RAM on that machine? Would Lubuntu be bootable?