My Laptop Died: Error message any suggestions?
 

Working away, multiple windows open, dah dah dah,
BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH
Then, all I get is:
"Windows could not start because the following file is
missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.


Am I totally screwed? Is my laptop fried? Will I be able to recover my documents & email files???

Had that message myself, I had to wipe completely and start from scratch, I would be interested if anyone knows how to fix it without having to wipe everything.

it's a boot configuration problem.. if you have the windows disk, it's an easy fix by following the instructions found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;330184

:winkwink:

Stuart you have made my morning look much better!
I hope Kenny can handle it!
See you in a few hours!

I've had this quite a few times, don't remember how I fixed though, but I didn't format c, that's for sure, so I don't think you're screwed

reinstall :) It is useull sometimes to reinstall windows.
The data will be lost?

yeah that is a known error. You shouldn't have to format to fix it.

Just reinstall and everything wiill be fine.That's happen once to me also.

Maybe reinstalling your OS can fix the problem without affecting your files. There's no need to format the disk

Im sorry I can't help, but it seems that your blue screen of death can possibly be fixed. Two days ago I got a real bad blue screen of death on my laptop then the harddrive made all kinds of creepy noises. The harddrive was fried and the data is lost. It was ok because I had backups. I hope you get your problem fixed soon and it's not too much of a hassle.

I have worked as IT support, and usually a corrupted file message indicates a Hard drive on the way out (assuming its not spyware or virus doing something strange). Formatting may fix it short term but usually the drive will get worse with time. Best bet is just to get a new hard drive.

If you have a USB laptop drive caddy, you can probably retrieve some data from the drive.

Bad hard drives suck :(

OMG I just hope they can save My documents, there is sooo much on there, including pics I just downloaded yesterday before deleting them from my camera..........

Microsofts sytem file checker utility might help.
you can try "Start", "Run", and type "sfc/ scannow", and hit enter.
read more about it here

only boot problems here...

get a new harddrive to copy all your important files from your old harddrive. reinstalling will cause all your files inside "My Documents" to be unaccessible because it will write a new one. but it is still there..(It happens when your previous username has a tight secured password)

Don't ever format lol
hit me up if i got plenty of time, we can solve that simple problem :)

Speaking of which… you can sometimes get this error if you have a USB 2.0 hard drive hooked up to your computer when you restart. Keep the USB drive unplugged when you restart/turn on the computer, then plug it back in. Doesn’t sound like this is your problem but I started encountering this a while back on one of my computers, if you have a usb drive plugged in it will always fail to boot giving the HAL error.

The HD is more hooped than first thought.... we took out the HD and plugged it into another computer and... well...
her Windows user is completely gone now, the entire "my documents and settings" folder is gone for that user... and the "My Computer" is only reporting 52gigs of the total 80gigs of the drive.

So... not good :(