hal.dll missing

[justlivyalife]

My sister's laptop is showing this error on Boot - wants me to reinstall that file.

I've tried running the recovery console from an XP disc I have at home (not the one that came with her laptop) and can get as far as it asking for the administrator password. I enter the password for the main laptop user account, and it rejects it, leave it blank and it rejects it.

Any ideas?

[130R]

Safe mode?

[justlivyalife]

Same error given in Safe Mode. hal.dll is missing or corrupt.

[LukeBird]

This seems to have all of the solutions to get it to work -

Clicky

Oh and that was first hit in google

[justlivyalife]

All of which include going via the Recovery console - which I can't get into... I've been on that site for about half an hour.

I can't into Recovery console because the administrator password doesn't work.

[130R]

Backup anything important by taking the hard drive out (or you may be able to take ownership via a new XP partition) and reinstall windows?

Edited by 130R on Friday 16th May 15:29

[justlivyalife]

I've just found the Fujitsu Repar Disc so going to try repairing the Windows installation on that once I've done a backup of data, then if all else fails new install.

Cheers for your help guys!

[malman]

justlivyalife said:

I've just found the Fujitsu Repar Disc so going to try repairing the Windows installation on that once I've done a backup of data, then if all else fails new install.

Cheers for your help guys!

A lot of manufacturer repair disks are just a format and re-image to base install so make sure you do the backup

[telecat]

History Lesson. MS-DOS and Windows 95 directly addressed the PC's hardware hence IRQ's etc. So basically the PC had to be specc'ed to the Intel/AMD Microsoft standard. On NT based operating systems the HAL sits between the OS and the hardware. It then translates the commands according to the Hardware that's there when the OS is built up on the PC. Hence if it is missing and you do not have a recovery disk then you have to run setup again. If you are lucky it should keep most of you stuff on the disk.

Now for a solution. If you have another disk install that and set that to be the primary disk and run setup to create a fresh OS on that disk. Then copy the HAL.dll from the new disk to the "old" disk and set that one back up as the Primary disk. This will also work if you use Partition Magic and create a new Partition and make that the Primary and the "old" partition a secondary partition and copy the HAL from the New Partition to the Secondasry and reverse the process.

[fluffnik]

A friend had something similar going on - ntfs.dll missing or corrupt, XP CD bombing out - turned out to be bad RAM.

memtest86 is your friend.

[xiphias]

Download an ubuntu live cd and use that to copy the file across.

Note: the main laptop user isn't necessarily the same as the administrator account.

[justlivyalife]

Managed to use the Windows CD to repair the installation - seems to be working fairly stable at the moment (at least).

Thanks again for the help.