36. How Do I Repair A Missing Or Corrupt HAL.DLL

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There may be an occasion when you boot up your PC that you receive an error message such as HAL.DLL file is corrupt or missing. In many cases this can simply be a misconfiguration in the Boot.ini file and can easily be corrected by instigating a suitable repair.

1/ Place your Windows XP CD into your CD-ROM and Reboot your PC.

2/ XP's setup program will automatically start and files will be loaded to memory.

3/ When you reach the Welcome to Setup screen choose the Repair option by pressing R.

4/ This will start the Recovery console and the list of Windows installations will appear.

5/ As you only have one installation on your PC you need to press the number which is relevant to your installations location. This, obviously will typically be 1.

6/ Type in your Administrator password. If you are using Windows XP Home edition the administrator password is blank by default so simply press Enter.

7/Now type: bootcfg /list.

8/ A list will now appear of all the entries in your boot.ini file.

9/ Next type: bootcfg /rebuild.

10/ Your boot.ini file should now be repaired.

11/ Finally remove your XP CD from the CD-ROM and then type Exit.

12/ Reboot your machine to see if the the problem has been cured.