System 32\hal.dll problem

B

BioTechguy

Member
I confess my ignorance caused the problem. Using Windows Process Manager; I killed an active process that I thought had been hijacked by spam or ???. The impact was my system died, and when I try to start it again I get "system 32\Hal.dll is corrupt or missing, reinstall the instruction ... Even though I set the BIOS to boot from the CD first; I can't move forward. My current plan is to pull the hard drive (Samsung HD161HJ) and make it a slave on my Sony System, copy the missing code on the the "slave drive". First, I don't know if this will work, second the Samsung drive does not have the same pin configuration as the Seagate ST#160021A drive in my Sony. Its not clear to me what I need to do to set the Samsung up as a slave. Both the Sony and the Dell are running XP serv pack 2 (and there is an Acronis 9 image on the samsung - just cant get it to load). HELP !!!

BioTech guy
 
Hello BioTechguy, welcome to NST

You'll need to post your boot.ini file and a screenshot or description of your partition layout on the drive. Basically, the lines in your boot.ini are pointing to the wrong disk/partition.

If you've got Vista as well this is simple to fix, but if not don't try this. Download the latest version of EasyBCD 2.0 Beta and re-add an XP entry. EasyBCD well ask to automatically configure boot.ini for you, which should fix your problem.

@CG: Maybe it would be a good idea to release a utility seperate of EasyBCD for auto-configuring the boot.ini since the feature is for older versions of Windows than Vista, W7, etc?
 
Hi Kairozmorro;

I was able to transfer all of the files to the hard drive of another computer - this avoided a real work related crisis and let me move on with some other tasks. I then tried the copy and paste of the System 32\Hal.dll file - didn't work. Since I had the data files transferred I then proceeded to reformat the drive using "Partition Magic 8" the out come of that was really bad - got an error message #4, would not allow me to proceed. The drive now has no label (even though I assigned one using Partition Magic ) - now windows explorer can't see the drive. I can see it with Partition Magic - I just can't format it. Any ideas on what I should do next?

BioTechguy
 
Boot the XP install CD and let it format the drive for you as part of the reinstall.
 
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