NTLDR and HAL.DLL problems

Hi everyone,

hope you can help me out, here's the back story, installed new anti-virus on my parents pc (Windows XP Pro), was doing a virus scan afterwards and the system crashed. Upon booting the system back up have had various problems, sometimes the system will boot up, but mostly had been coming up with a "NTLDR missing" screen, seem to have resolved this by looking through past threads using the search, and using recovery from xp disc and copying over NTLDR and NTDETECT to the c:\ drive.

But now when i boot, i get a "invalid BOOT.INI file ..... booting from c:\windows\" screen, then it goes to a screen with "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."

Help.

how can i copy a version from cd/floppy into the c:\system32\ folder? Or any other idea how to resolve this without formatting and re-installing from scratch.

Thanks a lot.

Bres.



:EDIT: just found this through searching the net, anyone agree with this method before i try it?


Quote:
The day before yesterday I got the message that windows
could not start because the file \system32\hal.dll is
missing or corrupt.
I have tried putting the XP Pro disk in the drive and
booting and booting from safe mode but whatever I do I
keep getting this hal.dll message.
How do I get to boot my computer so I



That message is rather misleading. It happens because the boot.ini file
that tells the boot where to look for 'Windows' is damaged, so it is
looking for files in the wrong place - hal.dll just happens to be the
first one it looks for.

Provided you have a 'proper' CD of the system, and not just a restore
one that puts back ex-factory state:

Set the BIOS to boot CD before Hard Disk. Boot the XP CD and, instead
of Setup, take the immediate R for Repair. Assume any password
requested is blank, and TAB over.

Use
Attrib -H -R -S C:\boot,ini
DEL C:\boot.ini
to delete the bad one
BootCfg /Rebuild

to search for Windows installations and make a new one

well it shouldn't make things any worse - if you want to be safe, you could always make a backup of the boot.ini file before deleting it

Best off doing a "repair" reinstall as you obviously have some corruption on the system drive. First get the disk to scan by using the recovery console and then do a normal reinstall but on the windows screen for the reinstall press R I think it is and that will do a repair reinstall but without losing all the installed programs. You can also use F2 if you have system recovery enabled (it comes up soon after starting the copying windows files off the cd.) but that may not restore the system files if they`ve been corrupted. hal.dll is where the hardware setup is stored and includes which type of acpi is used and just happens to be the first file it looks for in the boot order.