Big trouble, win Xp Home completely dead - Help!

Made a big faux paux! Can't remember why, but renamed HAL.DLL in
Windows\System32 to HAL.DLX.

When I next booted up, I get the error that HAL.EXE is missing or corrupted and
Windows cannot boot. Safe modes don't work. Tried a whole slew of emergency Xp
disks and finally went to HP's recovery disk (#1)and got nowhere with that.

Please, can someone help me recover from this without having to wipe the HDD
out?

Appreciate any help.

 

This might get more response in the Windows XP forum.

Do you only have a rescue disk and not a bootable XP install disk?

An XP install disk will allow you to boot to a recovery console command line, where you could use dos style commands to rename the hal.dll back to it correct name.

I am not certain if someone elses XP install disk would allow you to boot to the command line or not. I think that it might get you that far. It just would not let you do an actual install.

 

What exactly do you have for disks? A full version of XP Home on CD, recovery disks that came with the computer (make/model?), or some sort of recovery partition built into the computer?

 

If you have the installation cd you can use the recovery console to rename the file.

 

If the filesystem is FAT32, just boot to any Win98startup disk, and rename the file in DOS.
If it's NTFS, you can get a FAT32 bootdisk that will allow you to read NTFS volumes in DOS.
www.bootdisk.com

 

Why not just re-install XP? Just remember to boot up from the XP installation disk. When asked what kind of installation, select "Repair Installation ".

 

Led me to believe that he doesn't have a normal XP disk, just the HP disk, which you can't use to do a repair install.

 

My apologies for starting this in the proper Xp thread.

Have an HP Recovery disks (3). They don't allow any repair attempts. In fact, they apparently on work with FAT16, 32 while my laptop is NTFS! In any case the disk simply do not work. Out of warranty by just a couple of months -- ain't that always the case?

Called HP anyway and their response in "broken English" is the warranty is over and that I should just use the recover disk. They didn't understand that the Disks wouldn't work on NTFS!

Finally gave up and tried. My heartfelt thanks to all of you for the responses. It sho nuf helps when you realize so many others are trying to help.

Tried the setup install disks by MS and the first disk finishes with "disk i/o error" and just sits there. Can't even get to the A: prompt. So much for that one.

Called my favorite technician. He's ready for me tomorrow -- at a price, of course . He feels there's a good chance he can remove the HDD and go into it with his wonder equipment and make the needed fixes w/o losing my data or having to reinstall the OS. Hope so. Will keep you all advised.

Again, many, many, many thanks to all of you. And next time I promise to start in the proper thread.
Bob

 

All's well!

Just a follow-up. My favorite Techie remains my favorite. He plugged the HDD into that mystery machine of his and voila!, there was the "corrupted" HAL.DLX file. Quick rename and all was well.

It may well be that the boot disks had I/O errors because of the HAL.DLL faux paux.

When I feel braver, I might try a boot disk and see if they work now.

Again, many thanks for all your support.

 

Thanks for letting us know how it came out.