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Problem with BOOT.INI

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d00kie

Registered
Joined
May 30, 2004
Specifications of the computer involved.
Sempron 2200+ at stock
Biostar M7NCG 400
Mushkin Basic 512MB PC3200
Sapphire Radeon 9200SE
Samsung SP1614N 160GB, 8MB

During Windows XP installation, before the GUI part kicks in, the computer will have to reboot.

So upon reboot, I get an error: says hal.dll is missing or corrupted.

Googled it and found the solution, which is to delete BOOT.INI and then rebuild it in the recovery console.

I did that, but I forgot to rebuild BOOT.INI. But hey, windows XP got to the setup screen after showing the following error:

Invalid BOOT.INI file
booting from c:\windows

After windows had been completely installed, I went ahead and rebuild the BOOT.INI file. Guess what, the problem with the hal.dll reappeared. When I deleted it, it will boot, except with that Invalid BOOT.INI error again.

While windows will load smoothly, I find that the Invalid BOOT.INI error adds like 4-5 seconds or so to the boot time. While I can live with that, I would like to know whether this will cause other errors etc. or if someone has a fix :D

BTW, I have tried replacing hal.dll from other computers and some has no effect while others cause an error that says that the OS could no load kernel dlls, or something to that extent.

Also, I ran the Samsung hard drive setup utility and theres this Samsung ONTRACK thing that appears while booting that says Hit spacebar to boot from floppy. Don't know if Samsung's firmware? thing may be the source of the problem.
 
HAL.dll = Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), a file that hides hardware complexities from Windows applications.

So wouldn't that make it a hardware issue at the root? That would explain why you're getting the issue with other copies of HAL.
 
tom10167 said:
HAL.dll = Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), a file that hides hardware complexities from Windows applications.

So wouldn't that make it a hardware issue at the root? That would explain why you're getting the issue with other copies of HAL.

Thing is, it get the error that says hal.dll is corrupted/missing if I have a BOOT.INI file. All the solutions I've found on the next was to delete BOOT.INI and rebuild it. If I rebuild it, the hal.dll error comes back. Remove BOOT.INI and the system notifies that it BOOT.INI is invalid and then it will boot off the absolute default c:\windows and windows will continue normally.
 
sounds like a versioning error, had you installed service packs???? I'd just backup all my importants to cdrw or dvdrw and reformat and clean install
 
theMonster said:
sounds like a versioning error, had you installed service packs???? I'd just backup all my importants to cdrw or dvdrw and reformat and clean install

Did that twice already. I'm suspecting that it's the hard disk's bios as I decided to use the HD setup utility.

This seems to be the last problems (hopefully) of a PC build turned into a nightmare.

I bought parts for another computer to replace the 600MHz celly. Naturally, I had purchased the a new hard drive for myself. I attempted to clone using Norton Ghost and it looks like it completely successfully. However, I couldn't get the new drive to boot no matter what so I decided to do a clean install and transfer the necessary files. That was completed smoothly, but later on I realized that XP wasn't detecting the AN35N's network controller and I stupidly did a system restore, which, completely screwed up the IDE drivers and the restore console did not let me eject my CD or copy the needed file of a floppy. After all that time wasted I just decided to put the new hdd in the new build and just reuse my old one. Tried my old one and the system just freezes in the XP splash screen. Ugh, so here I am with a working XP on the new hdd that had this weird boot.ini problem, while I have to do another fresh install on the wd.

Just ran the sfc /scannow thing, completed without a hiccup.
 
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