My computer just crashed for apparently no reason (screen just went black) and now when I restart I get the message,
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt.
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please reinstall a copy of the above file.
The problem is that I do not know how to do this and my computer fails to go into safe mode or last known good configuration mode.
Can anyone please give me a hand with this problem?
Thanks,
Jason.
I've seen it happen before.
There are many possible reasons for this.
1) You have a filesystem error, which may have corrupted the file in question
2) Your boot.ini (hidden system file in the root of your harddrive) may have been corrupted, and windows is trying to boot from the wrong drive/partition, where no OS exists (I've seen this happen before)
3) Did you happen to add a new harddrive? (probably not, but...) If so, try removing it and see if that makes a difference
4) Do you by any chance have more than one harddrive, and change the boot order in the BIOS? It can have this effect as well. Also, if you didn't change the order by hand you can still have the same result if your CMOS battery happened to have run out and the computer decied to boot of a different drive on its own.
5) You don't happen to have any other bootable media inserted, such as a floppy disk or USB flash drive, do you? If so, try to remove these and see if it makes a difference. (I know my computer won't boot if I have a flash drive inserted)
If you have Vista, boot from your Vista install CD/DVD. There is a 'fix boot problems' option, which will attempt to detect your windows install and fix the boot procedure. You may need to go through it twice.
If that doesn't work or if you have XP: You can try taking a look at the drive in question through other means and see if there's something obvious -- for example, try getting a copy of the 'Ultimate Boot CD for Windows', or get one of the many Linux LiveCD distributions. With those, you can boot a working OS straight from CD, after which you can view your harddrive and see what is (or isn't) on there, and possibly fix the problem. You can copy a missing file over, or edit the boot.ini file, etc.
If the liveCD option won't work for you, you can also take the harddrive out of your PC and install it as a secondary drive in another PC, so you can browse the filesystem and see if there's anything obvious missing. This will also allow you to copy files off the drive and make a backup onto the other PC, in case you end up needing to restore your system back to the factory default.
As a last resort, you may need to boot from your Vista or XP CD and choose the 'repair' option. Note that you may lose some of your settings through that, and may need to reinstall windows security patches and some of your applications afterwards.
Also, depending on the computer you have, you may not have a plain windows install CD -- some computers come with a system restore CD which will erase the entire contents of your harddrive, and delete any documents/pictures/etc data that you have/had on the drive. Obviously, use at your own risk.
finally: a mystery crash with boot problems afterwards may be indicative of a bigger problem: it's possible that you have a virus, or that your drive is starting to die on you. (If you haven't already, enable SMART in your BIOS so it may give you some warnings on bootup if this is the case).
I've also seen boot problems when certain key system files i.n windows were compressed to save diskspace: early on in the bootup procedures windows doesn't know how to deal with those yet, and you can't start a PC when the entire OS itself is compressed.
I'm sure that there are more problems that can give the error you're seeing, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head... Good luck!
My friend had this and it was a bootsector problem. We fixed it ( in XP ) by booting from the XP cd. The boot order had to be changed in the BIOS settings, accessible usually by pressing <DEL> during startup. change the "first boot device" to "CDROM" and boot from your (presumably) XP boot cd. Wait till a blue screen comes along that has the option "Recovery Console" "press R". Do that. Now you're in the recovery console, with a command prompt ( ah, the good 'ol days ). type the command "fixboot" without inverted commas, then <enter>. The boot sector will be rewritten. "Exit" then go back to BIOS to change your boot order back to "HARD DRIVE" ( whatever its called ) and fingers crossed you can boot your system. If not, reread xlsior's excellent post :)
Thanks for the tips guys and especially to xlsior for taking the time to type all of that, it has helped a lot :)
Jason.
I've also seen boot problems when certain key system files i.n windows were compressed to save diskspace: early on in the bootup procedures windows doesn't know how to deal with those yet, and you can't start a PC when the entire OS itself is compressed.
I've noticed that if you have UAC on Vista won't let you encrypt these files, which makes compressing the Windows folder foolproof, which is nice, considering how huge it is.