I know when it happend, straight after Superantivirus supposedly fixed all my harddrive and then told be to re-boot . Then cam the message" hal.dll missing or corrupt" I red the microsoft fix--- It basically instructs to boot with a startup disk and re-sys drive C: But my problem is XP Home does not have the fix like XP Pro does. I have another computer which I could use to do the fixing, but my other problem is if I do like the microsoft fix says, will that not delete all my private Data ? its on the same Partition, I see now why people put windows98 on their same or second harddrive. Are there any other alternatives to the Microsoft fix ???

http://blog.ryantadams.com/2007/12/... And yes, Windows XP Home does have the recovery console. -Ryan Adams http://RyanTAdams.com

Google for answers. Lots of possibilities. LINK

So does that mean the xp recovery disk can do both XP pro and Xp home ?? I have a CD with the XP pro iso on it, does that have the recovery console on it ??? and can I use that without loosing my data on C: I only ever used it to install XP PRO on my other pc, or can I buy XP recovery console CD somewhere ?

Use the CD you have. It will work. -Ryan Adams http://RyanTAdams.com

Ok finally found out the R.C is on this CD. but when I followed the instructions as the link Adams posted, there was a slight problem. after I typed "bootcfg /default" R.C replied with the message "There are no boot entries, use '/add' or '/rebuild'". So I did that, but it then asked me , "enter Load Identifier..."? I did not know what to put in. so I typed '1', I also now know after it came up with the message "Enter OS"... I should have typed 'Windows Home edition' ,instead of help. Now unfortunately I have 2 boot sectors , and now windows sort of works ,but not the normal way. When it re-boots it comes up with the black screen and message "do you want windows to load off "1"., or "help" , bugger. Finally got back into my XP desktop ,but everything is now 12 times slower and Media Player 10 and Classic have become corrupt. I then re-installed MediaPlayer 10 , but can now play some video ,but not all , I checked to see if all my drivers were still intact and yes they are. Also MediaPlayer10 and classic will not play full screen mode anymore, even after re-installing it. PowerDvD6 still runs all my videos OK in Full screen. If anyone has any solutions how I can get the PC speed back ,I would appreciate it. Even just to bring up Explorer takes about a minute now, as before it took halve a second or something. Also when I click to switch pc off ,it does not do this automatically anymore. It just comes up with the message "It is now safe to turn off your computer". Its a Laptop by the way.

I had same problem with XP Home. I copied hal.dll from an XP Pro machine, loaded it in my pc. No problems. JT Army Strong