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Well, hello everyone again, this past week we were working on an old desktop model from Dell. The customer has been owned the computer for about 6 or more years and surprisingly she has never took the PC to any computer shop to repair and apply any updates to Windows. When she called us, she told us that the computer was not working anymore and the last thing she did was to use Windows Update.

The error she was seeing on the screen was,

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
system32hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file."

Something that we have found unusual is that installing updates in old computers can really sometimes mess up the whole system. Although updating your Windows system is a must and a recommendation from us to all of our clients, this time the situation was a little bit different.

If you find yourself in this problem, you can use the following instructions to solve this issue. Please remember installing updates is one of the options to make this problem appears, another options are,

1. The Hard Drive has been damaged or it just crash.
2. Somebody intentionally eliminate or modified the Hal.dll file.
3. A virus, spyware, or malware has damaged your Hal.dll.

Follow the steps below to fix your problem.

Tools to have:

1. Windows XP OEM full edition.

2. A know working CD/DVD drive

Steps - Option 1.

1. Insert Windows CD and boot from it.

2. Press R at the first prompt to get to the recovery console.

3. When asked about which OS you would like to repair press 1 and enter (in the case you have only 1 OS, otherwise choose the specific OS number)

4. Enter the administrator password as requested. (this will be the administrator password, if you don’t have and administrator password leave this blank and press enter or continue.)

5. Type bootcfg /rebuild.

6. When asked “Add installation to boot list?” Answer YES.

7. At the “Enter Load Identifier” prompt, type the name of the OS (Example: Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Home, or Windows XP Media Center.)

8. At the “Enter OS Load options” type /Fastdetect

9. Reboot and remove the CD.

10. Once in Windows, uninstall recently updates.

Note: If the problem arises again, you can do the 10 steps again and uninstall all the updates and all recently installed software.

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