Unable to Boot into Windows XP, Sort Of

[daddio1949]

Hi,

I developed a rather peculiar boot problem with Windows XP (SP2). When I turn on the PC, I receive the message that hal.dll is missing or corrupt. To repair this problem, I used my Windows XP CD and booted into repair mode and used bootcfg to rebuild boot.ini. This failed because I continue to receive the missing or corrupt hal.dll file. I also copied hal.dll from another installation into c:\windows\system32 and overwrote the prior file. This also failed to fix the problem.

However, I was playing with my computer's boot menu (MSI K8N Neo2 motherboard) and tried booting from my C drive (my boot drive) and my computer booted fine. In fact, I can boot into computer as long as specify the boot drive through the boot menu. My computer has 2 hard drives connected directly to motherboard: C drive (160GB) and D drive (200GB). I have 4 other hard drives connected through a PCI card. Windows is installed only on one drive, the C drive.

My computer was booting fine for over a year until yesterday. I believe this problem occurred because I accidentally knocked into the computer yesterday while it was running. The computer rebooted but failed to boot.

Can anybody assist me here? How do I get my computer to boot directly from the C drive without going through the boot menu?

Your assistance would be greatly appreciate.

Daddio1949

 

[pkme2]

Can you get to safe mode? Hit F8 at bootup and that should get you there.
I usually have a disk that has stuff like: hal.dll & mscoree.dll, and so on.

I just copy and put it in the System 32 file of Windows.

I also put the hal.dll file in Windows\ServicePackFiles\i386 so I hope this gets you going.

 

[daddio1949]

Hi,

I found my problem. Oddly, the order of the boot drivesin the bios changed somehow; I reset the order to boot from my c drive, and my computer boots properly. All is well.