<windows root>\system32\hal.dll file is missing or corrupt

S

SultanGris

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 14, 2006
Messages
330
Here is how i arrived at this error message.

I have 3 hard drives in my pc, a 30gb IDE, a 80gb IDE, and a 250 gb sata.

windows was installed on my 30gb set as master, and 80 gb set as slave.

I was having problems with my windows on the 30gb, I physically unplugged the 30gb from my system, formated my 80gb and installed windows xp, installed fine, I have a slipstream cd with xp 1 on it. so immediatly after getting it installed and at desktop, i installed sp2, rebooted, installed vid drivers, then i noticed that my instalation cd for windows was still in the drive, not that it should matter, so i removed it and restarted after installing the vid drivers, when it restarted i got that error, so i physically unplugged the 80gb hd and plugged the 30gb in, leaving the 80 unpluged, rebooted, and same error. my computer will boot, to either installation, only if i leave my xp install cd in the drive, if i take it out, i get the error.

so i got back to windows, did some research, tried this

http://www.compphix.com/corrupthal.html
didnt change anything, then i tried this,
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread....hlight=hal.dll
that didnt work either, but i can still boot to either of my windows installs only if my winxp install cd is in the drive,

i cannot figgure this out, it makes absolutely no sence to me how one install can affect annother install on a HD that isnt even plugged in, anyone have any clues as to whats going on? I may try annother complete format and reinstall, but i doubt that will help me as thats what caused this problem in the first place. any ideas?
 
Update, I unplugged my sata drive and my first ide drive and formated and reinstalled windows on my second ide again, and then plugged my sata back in, and its working, however im scared to plug in my first ide again, as it will problably cause the error to reappear. so it somehow seems linked to the sata and ide combo.
 
What partitions are marked as active? The boot order of the drives as listed in the BIOS is also important. If the drive on which you are installing is not listed as first in the boot order, you can run into wierdness, unless another drive listed before it in the boot order has a partion marked as active with the boot files in place.

The quick way to fix the problem is to set whichever drive you want to boot from as first in the boot order in the BIOS, then boot into Windows recovery mode from the CD, verfiy that the boot partition is marked as active using diskpart, then run fixmbr and bootcfg to make sure all the right items are in place.

The CD has those item in place, and uses them even if you are not booting from the CD to install or use recovery mode. When the CD is out, the OS bails due to the missing items not being present on an active partition on the first drive in the boot order.
 
well, im pretty computer savy, and ive done before many times what i tried to do this time, and the only diff was the presence of a sata drive, i know nothing about sata drives as this one was my first. as far as i can figgure, when i switched my ide drives around, my sata somehow took over as primary, as it also has a boot.ini on it, but no windows installation.
 
Im pretty sure it's related to the boot.ini file on the master drive, how it's setup, etc.
 
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