any idea what's causing this?

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt.
Windows root\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

I can dual boot into win2k and all looks fine, I'm going to do a repair from my WinXP CD, but what caused this in the 1st place?

the last thing I did to my XP partition was install SP1.

thanks,

Greg

 

<cough>
do u have a legit serial number?
</cough>

 

yup think so, it is a company licensed version.

Greg

 

I've got it working, found that the hal.dll in winxp\system32 was 76kb, whereas the one in winxp\servicepackfiles\i386 was 99kb.

copied the larger one over and all is fine.

Can anyone explain what happened?

cheers,

greg

 

It sounds to me that Win XP SP1 installed the wrong hal to your machine and that's why it wouldn't boot!!!
When I've upgraded servers here from single to dual processor I had to copy the CORRECT hal from the Win NT cd to the machine otherwise the machine wouldn't boot.Certainly with NT,the different HAL files ie standard PC hal,dual processor,MPS processor etc all have their individual filenames and you then have to rename the filename to hal.dll (Which is what NT recognises)
I assume XP works in a similar way!!!!
I hope I've explained this well enough,but I know that I mean anyway!!!! lol

Nick

 

the old re-install has me up and working, SP1 re-applied and no issues (touch wood)

greg

 

********

It's just done it again.

This has happened 3 times this year.

Anyone any idea wtf is going on???

cheers,

greg

 

AGGH!!

booted off WinXP CD, gone into repair done:

fdisk /mbr
chdsk /r
bootcfg /recreate (or whatever the command was)

still get the error.

booted back off CD, chose install, then asked it to repair the XP installation.

Still no joy.

Now stuck

Greg

 

I've found this problem occur when the pc has been turned off (or crashed) during statup. Happened to me last week. You're lucky it let's you into the debug mode, when i tried it just bluescreened the same..

 

An installations engineer told me that if Windows XP detects a rogue serial number when installing service packs it deletes an operating file, rendering your PC useless.

May be a rumour.

Cem

 

The serial number is fine, however I hadn't been registering XP and someone else has said that MS will think its stolen and send message to destro I386/sys.32 folder which has registered info

Dunno how true this is or not

Greg

 

Cem,

XP SP1 searches for several well known leaked volume license key's (FCKGW-...) during installation. If if finds one of them it will complete the SP1 upgrade but not allow access to Windows Update anymore. I haven't tried this as of yet though... Changed my VLK a while ago, just in case

Ian