Hi all, I've a friend on the phone who's XP won't boot. It's throwing up the error "...hal.dll..." is missing. Any suggestions/direction on how/why this has occured and how it may be fixed without 3rd party software? Thanks in advance
It's very likely a HDD error is present, such as a bad sector, again most likely. You will have to use a 3rd party software to diagnose the drive and fix it if it's defective. Afterwards replace the missing hal.dll from setup media.
Can you recommend one Mr.X? As things stand, the machine boots to this error and no further so i'd assume it would be a bootable disk?
Many thanks guys. I'll work my way through both of your input tomorrow once i get my hands on the rig. It's very late here so i need to sleep. I'll report back good or bad. Kindest regards to both of you for your time and effort
Hi guys again, Well here's how things went: 1. I used HDD Regenarator. No luck even getting it to boot. 2. Tried to go into safe mode with networking. No luck. 3. Ran a live Ubuntu to see if i could see the disk. No luck. 4. Took the HDD out and connected it via USB. Success. 5. Got the files/folders off it that my friend hadn't backed up and really wanted. Success. 6. Imaged the HDD i.e. selected files and folders. Success. 7. Formatted the HDD and tried it on a test rig re-installing XP. No luck. And so end't my journey so far lol. And thanks again to all you guys for the help
@HT, bear in mind that HDD Regenerator is for search, find and repair damaged sectors if present. It doesn't resolves missing dll though. What I'm trying to explain is that a bad sector/s could imply a data loss, in this case that dll or more system files which prevent Windows from booting. After you are sure your HDD is fine with no bad sectors in the first place, then most likely that dll and system files are missing due a filesystem corruption or malware activity or software failure. Then urie provided to you some guides to repair that hal.dll symptom. The best thing you did in this case was to backup important personal data. Congrats!
Hi again Mr.X After reading all the posts could it be possible that whatever caused this failure is a rootkit/malware and if so. Could it be possible that the files/folders i've recovered contain the same destructive exploit? I'm no expert by a long shot on this stuff hence my back-up/imaging etc. Is there any way to check what i've recovered for all and any nasties?