hal.dll error on boot up

gazozborne

gazozborne

gazozborne

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Joined
31 Oct 2005
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247
Location
Yorkshire
"reboot and select proper boot device"

Hi There,

So i finally decided to defragment my hard drive today while i went to work only to come back to a black screen saying;

"Reboot and select the proper boot device. Or insert boot
media in selected boot device and press a key"

Thought id restart it and use the repair console which didnt work however when i rebooted to hard drive i get the following;

"Windows cannot start because of the following file is either missing or corrupt:<windows root>/system 32\hal.dll"

It wont pick up any CD's i put in and no matter how many times i restart it just says the same thing, i've got a lot of valuable stuff on there i really dont want to lose if possible. Only solution i can think of so far is buying a cheap HD drive>installing XP>recovering info>formatting but wondering if anyone has anymore ideas i can try?

Thanks
 
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Same thing happend to me a few weeks ago. PC was working fine, turned it off and came back the next day to this message. :mad:

I googled it and found people mentioning do a fixboot and bootcfg etc etc and copy the hal.dll from the Windows CD back to the C:\ but none of that worked for me.... turns out that Windows wasn't even showing on the drive anymore! :eek:

Luckily I have two drives, so I installed on the other drive, copied everything I needed to keep and just blated the Windows drive and started again.

Very strange how it happened.

Try googling the message (or part of it) and following some of the suggestions, but you may have to just get a cheapy hdd, and go about it that way if you can't fix it.
 
Yeah i've tried googling it, spent ages on it and most suggestions come out with repair console or formatting...i cant do either though as it wont detect any CDs :\

My 2nd drive also has stuff i cant really afford to lose on it (paid for mp3s i didnt back up yet mostly) so i dont want to format either! Also been looking at external HD's so i dont need to back everything up to DVD's - do they allow you to install XP at all?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-040-LC

is the one i was looking at, either going to find a 20gb or get a really cheap 80gb...or fork out extra for a portable external drive with XP on for times like this.
 
right, update - i've borrowed a friends hard drive and put that in...with the buggered drive as slave...however when i tell it to start up from the XP Cd it says "please insert boot media" and when it goes to the hard drive it gives me the safe mode screen then just resets itself :-\

i've disabled the second drive in bios and made the new hd master but i still never get any XP repair console as it doesnt try to read the CD drives.

anyone have any ideas?

Thanks
 
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nobody?

tis driving me crazy as it wont read XP CD in any drive and changing hard drive makes no difference to the error messages. end of tether!
 
u also need if you do the expand route, u need hal.dl_ and halaacpi.dl_ and any others beginning hal. copy all these from the XP disc to c:\windows\system32\ use expand as they are cabinet files on the disc and need to be extracted not just copied.
 
Firegod said:
So it won't boot from the cd with even no hard drives connected?
Click to expand...

nah i get nothing, unplugged ide cables etc and it still says to insert proper boot disc :-\

also topic titles a bit misread now sorry, hal.dll problem has gone away now - i just get this proper boot disc error everytime instead.
 
Can you boot to a system floppy?

Create a "bootable" system floppy that has CD support and contains the EXTRACT.EXE command.

Boot to the floppy driver, then extract the missing system files from the CAB file on the windows XP disk. If you don't know which CAB file to use, look at the CABS.TXT file on the disk.
 
I had the exact same problem with a relatively new build recently (started off saying files were missing, then corrupt, then just gave me a disc read error), thought it was my Hdd dying but it turned out literally to just be corrupted windows files, as the guy above says either make yoursefl a bootable floppy or cd and then copy your files onto spare hdd, then format!
 
the hal error is caused by either faulty hard disc or your ide channel
is not responding, i seen this error years ago and replaced hard disc
no more Hal error.
 
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It's likely that there is nothing wrong with the H/D ( but don't rule it out). It maybe that the partition information has been lost or if the boot process is failing then it's not recognising the disks partition information and therefore can't locate the boot sector.

Your best bet as said, is to either boot from a floppy (with CD support) and run setup.exe from the install disk. Then use the recovery options.

Let us know how you get on.



:)
 
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