Need Help With Non-Destructive System Recovery

Probably not in the right forum ... but, help! I have a compaq presario with XP home. Yesterday, I followed some lame link and this morning all my .dll files are skewed. I tried downloading and installing the missing .dll's but that didn't solve my problem so I am now attempting a "non-destructive" (yeah, right!) recovery. My system uses 6 CD's for recovery disks. I have six sets of disks (another story). Anyway, none of the sets will get me through a complete recovery. It always hangs up at one place or another, most often on Disk 3 at about 42 percent finished. If I attempt to boot from the hard disk, it now tells me that hal.dll is missing. Any clues what might be causing the problems? Thanks in advance.

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Are you using dual-boot with more than one windows installed(such as Windows XP and Windows 200)? This problem normally occurs if you have an incorrect boot.ini file. Open the boot.ini file and check if there is any line under [operating systems] which points to an invalid partition. For example, if you have only 2 partitions and one of the entries points to say "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect" then it is incorrect as there is no 3rd partition.
If you have a bootable WindowsXP CD then boot your system from it, go to the Recovery Console and do the following:

1. Attrib -H -R -S C:\Boot.ini
   To remove the Hidden, Read-only and System Attribute feature of boot.ini.
2. copy c:\boot.ini c:\boot.bak
   Takes a backup of boot.ini just in case.
3. DEL C:\Boot.ini
   Removes the file.
4. BootCfg /Rebuild
5. Fixboot

Remember if you have any other boot loader installed such as GRUB then it might create problems.

As another option you can also try to replace the HAL.DLL file by connecting your hard disk as a slave on another working system. Copy the HAL.DLL file from the working system's C:\Windows\System32 folder (or download it from here) and place it in your HDD's correspong system32 folder.

Try the above and see if it is of any help.

 

 

 

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Thanks abundantly!!

The boot.ini file was the problem although not quite one of those that you suggested but you got me looking in the right direction.

Your assistance is much appreciated by the old grandma.

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