RedDem0n Posted August 13, 2006 Posted August 13, 2006 I hooked my computer up the other day after moving into my new house, and did all the security updates, and antivirus updates to it...restarted and right before I left for work I left it defragmenting my C: harddrive. 9-10 hours later when I come back from work see my computer on but not my normal screen...I see a message saying "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: /system32.hal.dll" Now I have no idea how this happened....I did a little research on this and its telling me that my boot.ini might be corrupt and to reload it from the windows xp cd using some kind of bootcfg /rebuild command from the cd itself....so heres the other problem....i cant seem to find my original windows xp cd anywhere....but the good side to this was that i had two other windows xp cd from my other two computers..one from my hp laptop and one from my gateway computer. so i put the hp laptop windows xp home edition sp2 cd in and did what it told me to do....right after i hit i want to go into the recovery console it takes me to the dos screen "Press the number that corresponds to the correct location for the installation of Windows you want to repair, typically this will be #1." ...So here's the thing...the drive that it says windows is installed is under D:Windows when it should be C:Windows..and that was the only one that was listed...so i picked that and did the other two commands to rebuild the bootcfg but it wouldnt work...this is the site i went off of btw http://pcsupport.about.com/od/pcrepair/a/missinghal_dll.htm now the thing is...what im thinking is my computer is not detecting the c:drive...only detecting my 2nd drive?...im not even sure whats going on because my original windows installation is my c:drive and my other drive..which im not even sure if its a label name is d: or some other drive came from my old computer when i just installed in my new one...so what im thinking is that its trying to read off the windows installation on my 2nd drive...and not my first drive for some reason? could this be why its giving me this error message? anyway im a bit stumped, and pretty stressed out .....any help would do, i really dont want to go as far as formatting my comp so I would like to get some expert advice on this....thanks much Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kingfisher Posted August 13, 2006 Posted August 13, 2006 Well, how about using windows system recovery and go back to yesterday? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RedDem0n Posted August 13, 2006 Posted August 13, 2006 As you can see by my post I'm a bit of a newb when it comes to this...How can I do that if I'm not even able to get into my windows? It gives me that error message during the boot up process. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kingfisher Posted August 13, 2006 Posted August 13, 2006 Can you boot into safe mode? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RedDem0n Posted August 13, 2006 Posted August 13, 2006 Nope Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeanDude05 Posted August 13, 2006 Posted August 13, 2006 Insert the XP disc and try to do a Repair installation. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RedDem0n Posted August 13, 2006 Posted August 13, 2006 takes me to that dos prompt just like the recovery console does Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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