[Mollysmom]

Help!

My Dell 4600 went to a blue screen message that said Windows had to shut down. A restart attempt said (after awhile) Invalid Boot-ini file. Booting from C:\windows\ - long pause with blank screen. Windows then attempts to start and then goes to blank screen again. When I do a control, alt, delete I get the message that says windows cannot start because file is missing or corrupt - Windows Root\system32\hal.dll.

Any suggestions? If I could even get Windows running for a short time I could use the diagnostic disk that came with the computer.

We have some data on the computer that we really need. Hope someone can help me.

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Have you tried booting to safe mode at all?
Reboot your computer and press f8 after the dell logo is displayed.
It should load into safe mode, Once there, I would try clicking your start menu, and going to run, and typing :
chkdsk c: /f
(Assuming C is your drive letter) This might fix your problem. It has worked for me,
But let us know if you can boot into safe mode or not

[Freekie]

Have you tried booting to safe mode at all?
Reboot your computer and press f8 after the dell logo is displayed.
It should load into safe mode, Once there, I would try clicking your start menu, and going to run, and typing :
chkdsk c: /f
(Assuming C is your drive letter) This might fix your problem. It has worked for me,
But let us know if you can boot into safe mode or not

[SRX660]

Heres kelly's korner take on the hal.dll problem.

http://www.kellys-ko...dll_missing.htm

SRX660

[Mollysmom]

Thanks for the tips. I finally did get the Dell to boot up to Windows XP. I quickly copied those critical files to disks and then ran the diagnostics for this computer. When it got to the IDE DISK: Read Test, we had multiple failures with Error Code 0F00:0240 (several message blocks) Code says address mark not found or media error. Second Error Code was 0F00:0244. Uncorrectable data error or media is write protected.

So far it is still functioning OK.

I had the blue screen problem a few months ago and ran diagnostics. Had same type of code errors but different message blocks.

What do these error messages mean? Is the hard drive slowly going bad?

Thanks for your help!

[SRX660]

Yes, this sounds like your hard drive is getting bad blocks on the drive. For now windows is just marking tham as bad and moving the data to a different location but they must be close to the area where windows keeps the startup information. I would do some testing on the HD to determine how many bad blocks there are and they keep track to see if more develop. If more develop it would be wise to think about HD replacement.

SRX660