This might because I pluged in Nicole's harddrive and copied some movie into the hard disk. Damn..

To solve this problem: Windows root\system32\hal.dll missing

— Replies to this Problem —
From: KuilanKTech on 01/06/2007

Before you guys go thru all the above steps, try the simple steps.

If you are getting the hal.dll error, most likely you have more than one hard drive/partitions. Don’t think replacing it right away solves the issue. Majority of cases it wont. In fact if you do, your problem most likely wont be resolved and replacing the hal.dll you will have to reinstall drivers for all existing hardware.

Unplug all your secondary hard drives and leave your main harddrive connected. Boot up using a "BootCD" or some kind of NTFS boot floppy or whatever. Enough to get you to a dos prompt. Go to the root of your c:\ drive. You will see your BOOT.INI file. There is also a backup of this file, most cases called BOOT.BKK Rename the boot.ini to bootback.bak, then rename boot.bkk to boot.ini

Reboot the system. You should be good to go. If success, reconnect your other hard drives. Also make sure you are booting the correct drive thru bios boot priority.

Do this as a simple step first. If still having a problem. Boot directly from the XP CD, and choose R for recovery console. For those that say "I can’t boot from CD…", go into your bios, and have your system boot from CD Drives FIRST. Reboot and leave XP CD in. You will see a quick "press any key to boot from CD". Hit a key. Wait till a minute or so after loading. Hit R for Recovery console.

Quick notes..before I continue. If you do decide to go this route. Make sure to leave all hard drives connected. Upon Recovery Console executing, it will scan hard drives for windows installations. If you have more than one installation, it will ask for which installation to log into. Please be sure to log into the primary installation. Also, if there is a main password. Make sure to have it handy. Your normal account password wont do. If you installed XP and created a password for ‘Administrator’, this is THE password you need.

After successfully login in to the installation. Do the commands.

Chkdsk /f
bootcfg /rebuild
fixboot
fixmbr

Reboot, and you should be good to go. Replacing the hal.dll is not a option. Even if you are getting the missing hal.dll error, I will bet you if you boot with a bootcd and manually check the windows\system32 directory, you will see a hal.dll file there. If for some reason you will just go ahead and want to try the replacing hal.dll file, at least rename the existing hal.dll file to hal.bak, then replace.

Good luck.