I have a PIII 450Mhz and 192Mb SDRam with Sound and Display Cards on Board. I have 2 H.D.D., the 1st one I have installed Windows Me Greek edition and the second one is partitioned and installed Win Xp (FAT32 mode) but unfortunately never worked. Each time I try to boot from Win xp a message that a file (hal.dll) is missing or corrupted appears and the boot fails. Will someone please help meeee!!!

The HAL.DLL is known as the Hardware Abstraction Layer-Dynamic Link Library. Windows XP Home or Professional should be found in your driver.cab in the \i386 of you installation CD. If you have your installation CD (which you should) simply extract the cab file onto your another machine, copy this file onto your boot disks (Emergency Repair Disks) (hopefully you have these as well) then boot your computer off of the boot disk, copy the Hal.DLL to the Win\system32 directory. Then reboot the machine.

you will get this message when the file is there sometimes and the only cure is to reinstall xp

http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q315233

hi i was getting the same message after installing linux on the new partition on my hard drive i've done several things, at the end i was able to log into windows (albeit without any hardware support - after the first login, Win XP took ~5mins to loop thru all devices on my comp) anyhow, here are the things i did - i don't know which exact one helped 1) i changed my hal.dll file as the previous poster suggested 2) i changed my c:\ntldr and c:\ntdetect.com files in a similar way (copied from installation disk) 3) i deleted my c:\boot.ini file and re-created it using ms-dos command "bootcfg /add" 4) i ran ms-dos command "fixboot" that's it

Ok guys, i got this problem a couple of days ago. "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. I searched all the forums and finally with a mixture of suggestions got my computer working again. As far as i can figure out, it is a problem with the boot.ini file, which becomes corrupt. Mostly when people have multiple boot but not always. I have Win XP Home edition on a dell dimension desktop. Here are a few options. First, boot up from the Win XP Installation disk, and go into the recovery console. Then type in FIXBOOT (drive letter): (eg FIXBOOT C:) if that doesnt work, then try CHKDSK /R After this my computer began to work! other options! fdisk /mbr OR bootcfg /rebuild Hopefully 1 of these will help! as i said, my computer corrected itself after the second command. Below is a link to a website, detailing all of the commands of Recovery Console http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp?url=/WI The following website, is another 1 i found which details how 2 repair XP! have a look if need be! http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm I hope this is able to help some of you troubled folk out there!