I bought 2 new sticks of ram for my pc recently. The sticks I got were pc4200 DDR2, which is the correct speed. Upon installing them, XP would not boot and I got hal.dll error. To try to fix this, I booted from my xp cd and got an error saying my mobo was not acpi compliant, which is false. I thought I had bad RAM, so I took out the new sticks, and still got the hal.dll error. Out of frustration, I put the new sticks back in, ran Killdisk and reformatted and reinstalled. Works perfectly now. I even ran Memtest86+ off of Ubuntu live cd and there were no errors. Any theories on why this could have happened. The problem is fixed, but I'm wanting to know why this could have happened. Any theories? ~winipcfg P.S. My make/Model is not dell Inspiron 1525. My PC is MPC Clientpro 375. Please sit back and relax while Windows 98 installs on your computer.

You may have had the original RAM manually configured in the BIOS.

I looked in the BIOS and could not find anywhere to configure RAM. Please sit back and relax while Windows 98 installs on your computer.

I would think what you describe closely fits disk corruption. Adding memory was just a cooincidence. Would have been interesting to see what would have resulted if you had gone thru recovery console and ran chkdsk f. I would recommend running chkdsk /r to mark out any bad drive clusters. Might even want to run some drive diagnostics. Reformatting always makes bad clusters look good... for awhile.

Wanderer- I tried booting from my xp cd to try the recovery console. It wouldn't let be boot all the way. it said something about shutting down to prevent any damage to my system. thanks for the advice. I will run chkdsk when I get home. Please sit back and relax while Windows 98 installs on your computer.