HAL.DLL is missing error message when trying to boot Windows XP
I received a call from a customer that basically had a rude message saying that the HAL.DLL was missing and refused to boot Windows XP.
At first I thought I could do a basic non destructive repair of Windows XP to restore all the missing or corrupted files. However, on booting up from the Windows XP CD, it would not find an installed copy of XP unfortunately.
I then thought we may have no choice but to re-install into a separate folder so we could keep all the data accessible, however it happily copied all the files during the text based setup, however after rebooting to enter the GUI part of the install it would then display the HAL.DLL error again.
It was at this stage that I remembered a trick for restoring the Boot files which may have saved us from having to reformat and reinstall the whole system again.
Thankfully it worked!
To fix this problem I basically performed the following steps:
1. Boot up from Windows XP CD.
2. Once you get to the Welcome to Windows XP Setup, press ‘R’ to go to the Recovery console.
3. It will then ask you for a Windows installation to work on and finally the Administrator password for the install.
4. You will then be presented with a command prompt.
5. Perform the following commands one at a time:
Attrib -H -R -S C:\Boot.ini
Del C:\Boot.ini
BootCfg /Rebuild
Fixboot
6. Reboot.
I found that the last command of ‘Fixboot’ did the trick without having to do delete the boot.ini file and rebuilding the boot configuration.
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Windows XP, Boot.ini
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