Reformat Problem

Hi everyone, I tried to reformat my laptop today because it was acting a little strange. I popped in the windows xp pro cd and setup was fine.. I selected the partition and waited for the C: drive to be examined. All of a sudden, my laptop just shuts off!? The notebook was connected to the outlet also so i figured it might be my battery?? Now, I can't even log on to Windows no more. My laptop boots but when I select 1) Windows XP Pro 2) Windows XP Pro Setup #1. it says <windows root> \systerm 32\hal.dll. please re-install a copy of the file. Can someone please help me out? any help would be appreciated.

 

just go thru the reinstall process again

the computer is supposed to reboot itself once or twice during the install. just leave it alone.

 

yea it rebooted once.. and now there is no progress ?! please help

 

Try and reformat/reinstall again.

 

happened nth times to me as well. it is basically a booting problem where the boot.ini of Windows has been compromised or corrupted. if your machine came with a hidden recovery partition (e.g. Acer, Gateway, HP, Compaq computers) it seems that hal.dll is connected to the hidden active partition which serves as the recovery installation image for machines that have them pre-installed. and in the absence of a correct pointer to which a WinXP installation is to access in the boot.ini file, WinXP is trying to access the file in the recovery image found in the hidden partition which of course creates the problem. this problem manifests itself if the new WinXP installation came from an installer instead of a bootable recovery image disk. by your description you used a WinXP installer cd.

there are two work arounds:

1. using fdisk to wipe out all partitions, then create new partitions, identify the active partition, creat extended/logical partitions, and finally reformat them. you need a bootable Win98 or WinME CD installer to access the old DOS Fdisk and format utilities. this is the drastic/radical way but ultimately more effective in solving the problem. after this step you can then proceed with the normal installation process using your WinXP installer. note however, that by destroying the recovery partition you lose the possibility of recovering whatever software bundle and drivers are stored there. you would need to get the proper drivers for your machine from the manufacturer's website.

2. use the repair option of your WinXP installer. where you boot from your CD and instead of using the installing you instead use the repair/recover console, log on the directory to repair, and choosing the rebuild the boot record command (type help to find the proper command parameters). this works only if your have not attempted to reinstall.

but since you have already opted to reinstall, option (2) is no longer viable for your case. you need the drastic measure (1). and even if you do not have this hidden active recovery partition in the first place, wiping out the partitions (at least the OS partition), recreating it, making it active, then reformatting it almost always solve your problem unless it is actually a HD mechanical problem and not boot sector related.

personally, i hate these pre-installed active hidden recovery partitions. to save on installation disk what these computer manufacturers do is require you instead to make a copy of the hidden image file by providing backup cds or dvd the first time you configure your notebook. and usually the hidden recovery image and the cd/dvd created backup of the original installation contains so much junk and trial softwares. why don't they just simply limit it to the WinXP installer and self-installing drivers and just make as customizable options the other trial wares instead of automatically showing them to the users who then would just the same uninstall them?

anyway, having said that as a parenthesis, i hope you get to solve your problem. i did this many times in the machines that i tweaked for friends and relatives that encountered this same problem, so far it always worked. believe me, in reality, you do not need the recovery partition if you have a copy of a licensed WinXP installer and drivers pertinent to your machine.

good luck in your adventure to the world of computer troubleshooting!

 

thank you all for your advice but one more thing.. can anyone explain what I have to do fix this problem? im a noob and all that technical stuff just went in one ear and out the other. thanks