hall.dll missing or corrupt

Andy27981

hi there

my old man tried installing xp professional over xp sp1 on his laptop without partitioning the drive - hence every time we try to boot machine we get message hall.dll missing or corrupt

heres what microsfts says
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;330184

but my question is - the machine was bought with xp already installed and we didnt get the xp disk - so therefore I cant go through that process, or can i? Is it possible to download one from somewhere? Will any xp cd suffice??


Any other ways around would be appreciated


thanks for any help

Andy

Ruu_Old

Eh I think any Windows XP cd will work (providing it is the same version as the one installed) not entirely sure on this one.

parliament

If you bough a Dell you wont have the original XP but it likely you would have received a restore cd that contains the XP image that is pre installed when you bought it.

If you arent worried about losing the old install just run the XP install again but this time select fresh install rather than upgrade or reinstall. This will give you the option to delete the partion and start fresh.

Tobias Greeshman

Came across this before actually.

I've heard of a couple of different reasons for the error, but the one that sticks is the boot manager boot.ini being misconfigured or corrupt. You will need the XP CD to fix this.

Boot with CD, and go into recovery console, type "bootcfg /rebuild" and then reboot to see if it makes any difference. That what worked for me anyways.

I'd try replacing the hall.dll on the harddrive with the one from the CD first though. to do this you'll need to use the "Extract" command to get the dll off the cd.

SwampThing

I'd say it's that the installation your auld lad tried is now pointing to a 'partition' that has no OS on it or doesn't exist.

The boot.ini probably has a couple of entries - one for the good install and one for the dodge one OR the MBR si now trying to boot from a non-existent partiton. If you can boot from the XP CD and choose Recovery Console. From there, try a fixboot and bootcfg /rebuild commands. This should list all XP installations, good or bad - you'll most likely recognise the good one.

Of course, if you can't afford to lose anything on the machine and you're not 100% comfortable with doing this, then I suggest you don't.

That's what I'd try anyhoo!


edit: just saw silas' reply - boom boom!

thebman

are you sure it isn't hal.dll that is missing?

http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?hal

Andy27981

thanks for the replys guys. Ive been able to get my hands on an XP professional CD so will try the suggestion in brim4brims link.

Searching the web now for boot disk, any suggestions?

Ruu_Old

BootDisk.com should be sufficient.

Andy27981

Thanks Ruu - am kinda looking for it free tho

Ideally something I can download, extract and then bang straight into nero and burn here at work, any suggestions anyone?

Andy27981

bump

Andy27981

anyone ?

parliament

what do you need the boot disk for?is the xp cd not bootable?

Ghost Train

If you have a proper xp disk, you shouldn't need a boot disk. Might have to go into the bios when the machine boots and select boot from cd-rom option if it's not reading the xp cd

and bootdisk.com software is free btw

edit maybe for cd images they're not free
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/ might be better for cd image