I was working on my puter today and all of a sudden I am looking at a blue screen saying windows must shut down or the computer might get damaged. So I try to reboot the system and right when windows starts to load I get a message saying that windows can not load because it is missing some DLLs. I reboot again and it tells me that windows is missing the hal.dll file. So I put in the windows install disk and tried to get to the recovery console to figure out what is going on. In the recovery console I used the check disk utility and after checking about 40% of my hard drive it stops and says there is a problem with my drive (maybe because my hard drive is partitioned roughly in half?). A few minutes later I rebooted and tried to get to the recovery console again using the windows installation disk. Now when I hit R to get to the console the computer simply powers off. What is going on here? I read this might be a corrupted boot.ini file. Any ideas? Is this a bad drive (and any way to test that)?

Download the diagnostic tool from the harddrive maker. Usually you would run the downloaded file with a blank formatted floppy in the drive. It will create a bootdisk that contains the diagnostic tools. Use that bootdisk to boot up the machine with the problem drive. Be careful which tests you run as some are data-destructive. Read the instructions carefully. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

You can go here and download the hal.dll file needed. http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?hal <===Lefty=== AMD 64 3200+ 200 GB WD Geforce 5500FX 256 MB 512 MB Ram Needs more. Windows XP