what could have happened...

[bobsmith1492]

So the family computer up and died. Specs:

XP mobile 2500 @ 2.1 GHz, 1.6V
1x 512 meg Mushkin 3200 value
Shuttle Nforce2 Ultra
5600U video
Maxtor 80GB 8meg cache

Anyway, it turned on one day to the message of "Windows is missing hal.dll..." and wouldn't boot up. It wouldn't boot to safe mode or do anything but display that. I ran chkdsk off the Windows XP cd, and it found unrepairable problems. Then, windows booted up fine, but no programs work, the video drivers are gone, you can't even open device manager, yadda yadda yadda. Apparently something happened to registry or the HDD partition, as Norton wants to try to fix something in the partition on the next boot and I ran Norton Windoctor and it said it found a bunch of ActiveX/COM errors and registry errors (~600 of each).

I'm thinking the HDD might be dying (crashed?) or the ram is bad; any other ideas? Could a virus do that?

 

[FlyingPenguin]

You suffered a registry corruption. You can restore an old registry backup, but that won't help for long is the drive has bad clusters on it.

What you need to do FIRST is download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic from their website and run the full (Advanced) diagnostic (not the Quick diagnostic). If the drive passes then you can repair the registry, do a system restore, and maybe get it back the way is was.

If the drive fails then you need to buy another drive, cross your fingers, clone the old drive to the new drive and then repair the registry and do a system restore.

To manually repair the registry so you can performa a system restore go here (if you can get into safe mode right now, then don't bother repairing the registry, just do a system restore to a restore point AT LEAST ONE WEEK before the problem occured): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

Hope this helps...