Alright forumers, I cannot start XP because at the startup it tells me that my hal.dll file is missing or corrupt and i should replace it or something like that. What should I do? Reinstall XP? I think I've tried that before and it didn't solve it. I can do it again if someone suggests it or have a suggesstion. Hmmmm! So many people with so many problems.

Yeah that's a pretty important file. It's the Hardware Abstraction Layer dll. Without it your toast, which you are since you can't start XP. Try a couple things. If it's FAT32, try booting to a command prompt and copying the hal.dll (from c:\windows\driver cache\i386\driver.cab, the cd or a floppy) to the hard drive (copy to c:\windows\system32) You can reinstall the OS, but choose to repair an installation instead of creating a new one. That will put the files back to what they should be. I find that if you cross your fingers, say a prayer, sacrafice a chicken or virgin (which ever you can find first) it works more often than not.

TONG how about some system info?? your wording suggests its not the first time you've had this problem.If it is a recurring problem some details of your system would be most helpfull

Sacraficing a virgin, eh. Well anyways how would I copy using DOS or command prompt. I haven't done it before so can you guys show me the steps to copy the file to a certain directory? And Peter, yea this happened before but it was my ntoskrnl.exe file. But since I had nothing important on my hard drive I reformatted and reinstall WinXP. And how does my sys info help? If it might help in anyway, here they are: -AMD AthlonXP 1700+ -MSI K7T266 Motherboard -512 MB DDR SDRAM -GeForce4 MX 440 -SoundBlaster Audigy Gamer -2 40GB Maxtor Hard Drives -DVD-Rom -Plextor Plexwriter -FLoppy -Windows ME and XP

alright I tried to repair the XP installation first but I didn't know how to. I said i wanted to repair the Windows installation and it took me to a Recovery system (i forgot what it was called) and i didn't know what to do after that. Can somebody guide me to repairing my windows installation?

Not sure on the repair, as I have not done it, but do you have xp/me on the same or different partitions??? If the same, you may try putting another partition on and install XP on that, esp. since you've had numerous startup problems w/ major files. I may suggest more later, but its late and I must sleep. William

do you have ME/XP on seperate partitions or on seperate HD??Are they both FAT32?? from within ME reinstall xp into the old XP directory this will reset everything MBR/boot.ini/hal/etc and you wont lose dual boot