I recently started recieving a message on boot up that I was missing hal.dll. I couldn't get the computer to boot at all. Not even safe mode. I tried to reinstall windows with the cd but I could only get to the screen where you either install, repair or exit setup. When I try to install or repair, the bottom of the screen says that it is examining the drive but it doesn't do anything. My motherboard is an MSI K7T266 Pro and has a built in raid controller. I thought maybe that was causing a problem so I moved the hard drive off of the raid controller and plugged it into where my DVD player was. I then went into my bios and auto detected and found the hard drive. When I tried to reinstall windows that way, I still got the same message. It seems that my computer can see the hard drive but just won't read from it. Any suggestions on how to fix it would be great. I don't really want to reformat unless absolutely necessary. Thanks for the help... steve

If you've got another hard drive try using that as master to boot to windows... then see if you can read/write files from the one your having troubles with. If you can, I'd suggest backing up everything you want to save and then formatting it. If that won't work or you don't have another hard drive... try getting online and checking out the manufactures web site to see if they have any answers... I'd start off by trying HDD access with a boot disk... Good luck, I'm sure someone else will help too. TK.

thanks for the reply.... I think that I am going to try the second hard drive thing. I don't currently have one but I think I might pick up a small one. Or I might just borrow one from a friend. Thanks again for the response...

Yup Boot from a startup disk and see if you can see the HD from dos. That will help you decide if you are getting a new drive or just reinstalling windows. Good luck Greaner