Hey guys.

Well, my new PC running XP Pro has gone tango-uniform on me. When I turn it on I get a prompt telling me that the 'hal.dll' file in the System32 directory is missing or has become corrupt.

I have an XP Pro disk but the PC doesn't seem to want to let me boot from the DVD drive. I tried running the Norton Ghost disk, but it's prompting me to write errors to the A: drive and I have no floppy in this machine. I tried switching the write process to the C drive but to no avail. I also tried installing the floppy from my old machine but the new machine won't see the DVD drive when I do, hence rendering the Norton Ghost disk useless.

I tried to install the NTFS drive as a slave in my old PC (which already has a FAT32 drive installed), but it only sees this as a primary drive and tries (and fails) to boot from it.

My question is, how can I transfer the 'hal.dll' file I've downloaded to my old PC onto my new PC given that the old PC won't recognise the NTFS disk of the new PC, there's no floppy drive to which to output the Norton Ghost errors in the new PC, and the new PC won't boot from XP Pro?

I was under the impressing that there's a patch for 98SE to allow it to read/write from/to the NTFS disk? I've only been able to find the patch for 2000 and not for 98SE. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Al.

I was under the impressing that there's a patch for 98SE to allow it to read/write from/to the NTFS disk? I've only been able to find the patch for 2000 and not for 98SE. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I can't really help you with the rest, but I can tell you that Win2000 does not need a patch of any sort to enable it to write to a NTFS disk. NTFS is Win2000's preferred file system type.

There's a Sysinternals read-only NTFS driver for Win98, and I'm unaware of anything else. I'm not even quite sure why it's read-only. They do have NTFS read-write software, but it's probably more than you're willing to pay. You could just find another NT-based system (NT, 2k, XP) and put the drive in it.

I'm not even quite sure why it's read-only. They do have NTFS read-write software, but it's probably more than you're willing to pay.

I think you just answered your own question there, Bitt.

Sorry. Didn't quite complete my thought, there.

They have that Win98 NTFS ro driver. The only rw driver they have is for DOS. I meant that I wondered why they didn't even sell a rw driver for Win98 at all.

What Motherboard does your broken pc have? What happens when you try setting the Boot sequence in your BIOS to just CD?

This is supposed to be a known problem on XP, fixed with a recent service pack. It is a timing & cache issue within the kernel. There is a knowledgebase article at the Microsoft site on how to deal with it. I have had this turn up twice, and I seem to recall the fix was quite complex. I am not sure that just copying the HAL file will actually work: during installation, a temporary HAL is built from a set of generic drivers on the fly as the installer loads. As it investigates the system, it then rebuilds a custom one to match your hardware before it reboots for the first time. If you simply copy a HAL, it might not match the hardware on your machine.

Are you sure you have set your BIOS to be able to boot from CDROM? You should also check the jumper settings on the DVD drive as a couple I have played with don't like to boot if they are not the master drive. Have you no way of blagging a CDROM drive from a friend for a quick fix? They are dirt cheap to buy anyway - why not consider buying one and installing it so you can just get the problem fixed quickly.

You could also pop your XP disc into whatever pc you're using to get on this site and then doa "Create setup floppy" I think it's more than one floppy, but then it lets you boot off the floppy to get to that stuff...

He has no floppy drive on the machine that's failed. Another solution would have been to create an emergency boot/recovery disk, but again, no floppy drive.

Having said that though, a floppy drive and cable costs about E5 locally, why not buy a floppy drive?