Help! PC Recovery Problem

Last night I decided to do a system restore. I've done em before--so I thought, no problem. However, it was late and I guess I wasn't really thinking. When I chose System Restore, Two options came up. One to do a Microsoft System Restore, and the other to do a PC Restore. I chose the PC Restore. When I realized I had chosen the wrong one, I tried to stop the process but couldn't. So I just turned my computer off. I thought if I did that it wouldn't go through with whatever it had been doing.

When I turned the computer back on I got the following error message.

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
windows root\system32\hal.dll.
Please reinstall a copy of the above file.

Anything I can do short of trying to locate a reinstallation disk?

 

will the restore still work ?
if not the only option is a reinstall
jim

 

I just get the error message. I'm trying to find a way to see if there's a way to get around it.

 

not to my knowledge other than doing a repair/install with xp cd

 

Oops, part of the error message got cut off. It was
Windows root\system32\hal.dll.

 

Congratulations, you've broken your windows installation.

For future reference, if your PC is busy rewriting your Windows installation (for example doing a system restore or similar, which requires overwriting a good chunk of your OS), it is a very very bad idea to interrupt it.

Apart from that, it is *always* a terrible idea to switch off your computer while it's accessing the harddrive. A friend of mine ended up with a physically damaged harddrive because a friend accidentally pulled the plug while it was working.

But hey, if you're lucky your harddrive still works, and you only need to reinstall Windows. Look at the bright side.

(hal.dll is one of the really really important files in Windows. It's short for Hardware Abstraction Layer, which means it's the component that allows Windows to run on all sorts of hardware (AMD and Intel CPUs, hundreds of different motherboard types, dozens of harddrive brands and so on. All this goes through hal.dll and comes out as "generic" hardware that Windows can communicate with.

If you managed to corrupt that file, there's no workaround whatsoever, other than digging out that Windows CD and get to installing...

You could try to simply copy that file from a separate Windows installation, and if you're lucky that'll work. But it might not be the only corrupted file, and even if it is, your system is still stuck halfway between two restore points.