Ok so when I turn the pc on I cant even get to the XP logo. after the bios loads and all I get a black screen. I thought my raptor HD died.::cry:: But I was able to back it up on my brothers PC and it seemed fine.

So I ran the recovery xp disks (the 6 disks) and after I hit R and chose the drive it blue screened. Next I tried the boot disk with ntdlr,boot.ini and ntdetect.com and when booting it gave me: The root>system32\hal.dll file is missing or corrupt.

tried adding that file from another xp machine to the boot disk but it didnt work.

Now I dont know what else to do and I really dont have any cd's ect to reinstall...

BTW: I cant even get to the safe mode, last known good config screen

bump

this maybe a long way round but i know of no others, get hold of a formatting program eg: killdisk. this will erase all data on you hard drive basically it will be like when you get it from the shops. after you have formatted your drive (this will take a while), just try re-installing windows, this should solve your problem.

g33k.

**edited found some more info*
i was searching around, found out that XP has a handy little rebuild command heres the link http://www.compphix.com/corrupthal.html

if you reformat, you will still need the HAL.dll -- this is a vendor specific file.
if you have the OEM recovery disk, you should find a copy on it.

My problems were different, but the need to avoid a reformat was important to
me.

See this post for a summary of how I got access to the HD

You can force a Hal change by inserting the XP disk and booting from the cd - when the screen asks if you want to press F6, press F5 instead - after a few seconds you will come to a screen to select your Hal - helps to know what it should be before hand. Then carry on to a repair Install.

If that cpu you have is a dual or hyper core, then you probably have an ACPI Multiprocessor cpu - if it is a single processor, then you likely have an ACPI Unprocessor cpu.

However, check into that.