[magusbuckley]

Hello:

I'm pretty good with computers. A guy at work asked me to have a look at his PC because it won't boot.

I bring to the house his Sony Vaio, running Windows Media Center, and on boot see the "hal.dll missing or corrupt. Please replace this file." message. He doesn't have a floppy drive so I got a bootable CD from bootdisk.com. After buring the .iso, I was able to boot to DOS and access his SATA Hard Drive. It looks like it's busted into two partitions. The C drive, only 7 GB, looks like the restore drive. The D drive, in his case, is the system root. I copied his D:\Windows\system32\hal.dll to the root of C. Then, I burned a copy of my own hal.dll (XP Home) to CD and replaced his original with my own. Rebooted and still got the message. I copied the original file back from his C drive to the D:\Windows\System32 folder. Of course it's still broken because this was the original damaged file.

Do I have to have a specific hal.dll file to fix this problem and if so, do any of you have a copy of this file I can use to fix this PC?

Any and all information will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

magus

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Not sure what type of boot cd you used from bootdisk.com, but no DOS environment can 'see' NTFS partitions (I'm assuming the XP MCE installation is on an NTFS partition and not FAT32). You cannot access any NTFS partitions by "booting to DOS" as you claim to have done. If you managed to do so you certainly were not in a DOS environment. You probably downloaded a Linux-based ISO and made a boot CD from that, (which can access NTFS partitions) but it's not DOS.

That aside, I think this may help if you have an XP CD:


http://pcsupport.abo...storehaldll.htm

Edited by pip22, 03 May 2007 - 03:44 AM.

[pip22]

Not sure what type of boot cd you used from bootdisk.com, but no DOS environment can 'see' NTFS partitions (I'm assuming the XP MCE installation is on an NTFS partition and not FAT32). You cannot access any NTFS partitions by "booting to DOS" as you claim to have done. If you managed to do so you certainly were not in a DOS environment. You probably downloaded a Linux-based ISO and made a boot CD from that, (which can access NTFS partitions) but it's not DOS.

That aside, I think this may help if you have an XP CD:


http://pcsupport.abo...storehaldll.htm

Edited by pip22, 03 May 2007 - 03:44 AM.

[magusbuckley]

pip22:

Hello and thank you for the reply.

The disk I used from Bootdisk.com was an NTFS Boot Disk. On it, I found command.com. I ran it to see what I was dealing with and it said Windows Melinium Edition. This could be a DOS-like environment I suppose. I can tell you that when I used my own Windows XP disk, I was unable to run the recovery console because I couldn't get to the SATA drives (no driver for the RAID stack). When I use the NTFS Boot Disk however, I am able to access the drives.

I wonder if it is even possible to use the hal.dll file from XP Home or Pro to fix Windows Media Center Edition? The guy I'm doing the work for doesn't have any CD's (typical, right?).

I followed the link you provided, but I'm not sure it will help if I don't have a Media Center CD. I'll try running that command when I get home from work this afternoon. I'll be trying to put my own hal.dll file in the place of his corrupted one. The hal.dll file I was trying to use when I made this post was one I had downloaded from the net. That's what got me wondering if Hal.dll is standard across the board.

I'll run that command when I get home and let you know what I come up with this afternoon. Until then, what you think about replacing that file with one from another OS? Think it'll work?

Thanks,

Magus

[magusbuckley]

Hello To All:

We're still working on this problem.

We've expanded a copy of Hal.dll from XP Home, copied it into the system32 folder, and that didn't work. We'd like to try running some of the other commands we've seen about rebuilding the boot.ini file (which looks OK to us), but we can't run that either. We are unable to get into the recovery console because we don't have the SATA controller driver. Windows XP Home and/or Pro are unable to find the HD. We can manipulate the files by using an NTFS Boot Disk from bootdisk.com, but we are limited to basic dos commands. Therefore, we are unable to run expand, btcfg /rebuild, etc. We're just trying to get a copy of Hal.dll for Windows Media Center now. I hope this will help.

On this VAIO, the Windows folder is on the D drive. Boot.ini is in a SONY folder on the C Drive. Sometimes, when we copy hal.dll, we get a message stating that boot.ini can't be found. Still, it copies the file....or at least we think it does.

This guy doesn't have the restore CDs or a Windows CD. My buddy and I don't have a Media Center CD, or we'd just reinstall the OS with the license key on the back of the PC.

Any help?

Thanks,

Magus