Hi all, I booted into WinXP today and couldn't get through the boot sequence. This did follow an unclean shutdown (forced to power down due to a hanging system). I ran chkdsk, which (claimed) to repair a few things. When I rebooted, I got a message that Hal.dll was corrupted or missing. So I went into the recovery console, typed "expand d:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll" as I was directed to by another web-site. But I get a message telling me I don't have permission. I can't figure out where I can give an admin password. I tried "logon", but it doesn't seem to do anything - just gets me back to c: Any idea how this got corrupted in the first place? Any other ideas? Another question - can I install the OS without erasing the existing data? Would I do that from the OS disk itself? I'm in a desperate state. Can anyone help?! Thanks, Michelle.

hal.dll is one of the files in the boot process. It or part of it was in the HDD sectors repaired with chkdsk. It could not rewrite it for you. the basic one from the Cd is seldom able to help. If you get an error regarding a missing or corrupt hal.dll file, it might simply be the BOOT.INI file on the root of the C: drive that is misconfigured Insert and boot from your WindowsXP CD. At the first R=Repair option, press the R key Press the number that corresponds to the correct location for the installation of Windows you want to repair. Typically this will be #1 Type bootcfg /list to show the current entries in the BOOT.INI file Type bootcfg /rebuild to repair it Take out the CD ROM and type exit