hal.dll is missing or corrupt

Windows XP repair how to's: hal.dll is missing or corrupt.


Often we are asked about booting errors, and one of the more common problems is a hardware abstraction layer link library (hal.dll) will become corrupted or deleted accidentally. These HAL files and libraries are at the heart of the windows communication with the hardware connected to your computer and are necessary for Windows to operate.

When issues like this are encountered it is often due to an improper booting device being pointed to in the BIOS, at other times it may be due to a dual boot configuration going bad, or the boot.ini has been altered for some reason. Whatever the reason, here's how to correct this situation.

First you will need a boot-able Windows installation disk, and know how to access the BIOS of your computer. On almost all computers instructions to do this will be displayed with first splash screen in one of the corners as a press F8 or F10. If this isn't the case with your machine look on-line or in the users manual for your machine.

Step 1.
Turn your machine on and go to the BIOS, as described above, and check the boot order, it should be C:/, or in some cases the disk could show as hdd0. Make sure it is the first partition, on the lowest numbered drive. If this is incorrect then change it to represent the correct hdd.

Step 2.
Restart the machine, if the issue still exists, you need to repair the boot.ini file. Do this before proceeding to step three, instructions for this are:

to repair boot.ini you have to boot of your windows 7 dvd, select repair, chose DOS promt,
Make a
dir/s bootrec.exe to find out where the file is


then write this two commads:
Bootrec.exe /FixMbr
Bootrec.exe /FixBoot

and you are ready to go.



Step 3.
Generally these two solutions will repair your issue. In the rare event that these don't solve the problem you must resort to replacing the hal.dll from the installation disk
for your OS. Here's how you do that.

Boot the computer using the installation disk and as soon as the first splash screen appears, quickly press “R” to go to the recovery console. If you don't get the command prompt window, try again. At the command prompt type in:

expand x:i386hal.dl_ y:windowssystem32hal.dll

In the above line change the “x” and “y” to reflect the cd-rom you have the install disk in for x, and the disk windows is installed on that you want to repair for “y.”

The above repair actions will correct most instances of a corrupt or missing hal.dll, but in very rare occasions it won't. If you have tried the above and it did not repair the situation you need to do a repair reinstall, the instructions for this are here:

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winxppro/installxpcdrepair/indexfullpage.htm .

If this final solution is to no avail, sadly you may have a malfunctioned HDD or possibly a cable that has gone bad and replacement is in order.