I have Windows XP Home Edition SP2 up-to-date on a Mobile AMD Athlon
XP -based PC.
My computer used to function well, except on the 9 of April in the evening.
When I realized that a malfunction happened, I tried to roll-back to the
last system recovery point
(Of the 8 of April) but this didn't correct the problem.
Furthermore, the malfunction was about a feature I used several times the
day the bug happened (on the 9 of April).
Now, let's describe the feature that no longer work :
I usually use Windows's multiboot feature to boot some flavors of Linux,
memtest, freedos, and so on ...
And this feature broke down, with a message like :
"<Windows Base>\system32\hal.dll is corrupt, reinstall a copy of this
file"
Then I tried system recovery like mentioned above.
Since this didn't work, I looked at this file :
- his size was 88 Ko (reported by explorer).
- his name in the filesystem was 'HAL.DLL' but it's internal filename was
'halacpi.dll' !
Note : there were no other hal*.dll file in my c:\WINDOWS\system32
directory.
I then made a complete filesystem check at startup but there was nothing
wrong.
I then went into the 'sp2.cab' installation package and found 9 files named
about hal*.dll :
03/08/2004 22:59 105 472 hal.dll 103 Ko
03/08/2004 22:59 131 968 halaacpi.dll 129 Ko
03/08/2004 22:59 81 280 halacpi.dll 80 Ko
03/08/2004 22:59 150 656 halapic.dll 148 Ko
03/08/2004 22:59 134 400 halmacpi.dll 132 Ko
03/08/2004 22:59 152 704 halmps.dll 150 Ko
03/08/2004 22:59 77 696 halsp.dll 76 Ko
(sizes in Ko reported by explorer)
I then extracted them all into my c:\WINDOWS\system32 directory.
I noticed that each of these 9 'new' files have an internal filename
matching their filesystem filename.
I then restarted Windows ; it re-discoverd all my peripherals but apeared
very annoyed and confused ...
Then I rebboted in order to try multiboot but this feature was still broken.
Could you please help me to reinstall the HAL and/or multiboot feature of
WindowsXP ?
I thank you all ; your advice would be very helpful.
