ntldr missing or hal.dll missing and wont boot Installed them R console
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Britec Computer Tech Help Support Forums  « Microsoft Support  « Windows XP Support «  ntldr missing or hal.dll missing and wont boot Installed them R console
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Author Topic: ntldr missing or hal.dll missing and wont boot Installed them R console  (Read 513 times)
capt1njohn
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« on: March 31, 2011, 02:00:39 PM »
Hello I am new to this forum I hope someone here can help.
My computer wont boot up. I have 2 hard drives. The first one is a Western Digital 250GB (master) it has 2 partitions only one has an actual operating system on it (XP), the other has a copy of another drive I had that crashed last year on it, which had XP on it.  DOS will still pick it up as a partition that has an installed operating system, (don’t know if that’s relevant or not but thought I would et you know in case it is. The other drive is a Western Digital 160GB (Slave) and it is my secondary drive (not the master). My system is old and one that I built from an Intel Tualatin 1.2gh chip. It is in a Asus MB I have 512 meg of ram, separate sound and video cards.

Going back a few weeks ago my secondary drive 160Gb with XP wouldn’t boot up. Error message was Hal.dll was missing or corrupt. I mainly used my secondary drive for burning CD’s and DVD’s.  I didn’t have time to address it at the time so I used my main drive 250GB with XP for everything now. About 2 weeks ago after my first drive went down I installed a program that I had been using as freeware and upgraded to the pay for version called I-obit. It runs in the background and is supposed to halt and clean up registry problems and other file errors, like the ad said…..
Protect, repair and optimize your computer with Advanced SystemCare Pro. Advanced SystemCare Pro promises to make your computer faster and safer with just a single click. It removes spy- and adware, prevents security threads, deletes temporary files and fixes registry errors. Easy, quick and effective."

I also run Trend Micro antivirus internet protection.
Any way this is the only thing I did in the last 2 weeks to my PC. The only other thing was automatic updates by windows. Several days ago I got online just before I went to work and the message on my screen was “ automatic updates have been downloaded and windows must restart. Do you want to restart now? And a count down timer. I selected Restart later. Then when I was done with what I was doing the message popped up again “Do you want to Restart now?” So I clicked Restart and the windows shutting down screen came up and I left. 2 days went by and I came back to my computer only to find the “Windows is shutting down” screen was still trying to shut down. I held the power off button and shut the PC off. It never started again. It will go through the boot process and stall just before it gets to the screen that I select which operating system to use. The cursor is flashing and the Y∞Y∞ symbol displayed.  I  tried running the recovery console and doing fixboot thinking this might help. The Y∞Y∞ went away but it still just halts with a flashing cursor. I tried switching the boot drive to the 160GB slave drive and it came up hal.dll is missing. I even made a boot disk floppy and tried that. The only difference using the boot disk is that boot up goes as far as the screen where it asks what XP system I want to boot to. If I boot to the slave drive XP Operating System it says Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll. If I boot to the master drive XP Operating System it says, Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. So I used the recovery console and tried expanding hal.dll to c:\windows\system. Then is started coming up ntldr is missing. Again I used recovery console to copy ntldr and ntdetect.com over the old files on both drives. Still I get ntldr is missing when I boot to my slave drive and a flashing cursor on my Master drive. I even repaired the boot.ini file. I still get the same message I did before when I boot with the floppy, that hal.dll is missing. When I boot without floppy to the slave drive I get ntldr missing. I believe I’ve tried everything I read on this forum to no avail. I am wondering if my boot.ini is incorrect. Below is how it reads, keep in mind I have 2 drives with the first one having 2 partitions one with a valid XP operating system and one partition without and the slave drive with one XP operating system.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Windows
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\Windows="Microsoft Windows XP Professional 1" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Windows="Microsoft Windows XP Professional 2" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

The only thing I haven’t done is fixmbr as I am not sure what that will do. I was hoping not to screw it up worse than it is now. It’s tax time and my tax software is on the main drive along with docs I need for taxes. I know this reads like a book and I am sorry but its stuff I think you will need to help me.
One other thing is that when I went to the CMOS AwardBios Setup Utility and clicked on the Primary Master and Primary Slave Hard Drives to compare the Cylinders (1024), Head (255), Sector (63), CHS Capacity (8422MB), & Maximum LBA Capacity (8455), I found that they are the same for both drives even though Master drive is 250 GB and Slave Drive is 160 GB. I cant see any way to change this. So I don’t know if this is normal or not.

Thanks
Capt1njohn
« Last Edit: March 31, 2011, 02:16:05 PM by Britec » Logged
Britec
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« Reply #1 on: March 31, 2011, 02:33:03 PM »
 Azn Capt1njohn,

Welcome to the forum

Do you know what drive inside the case you are booting to?

BOOT.INI - Examples of boot.ini files


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To edit your boot.ini file, open the root partition of your hard drive (normally C:\) and find the file called "BOOT.INI".
You may need to enable hidden files as follows:

Folder > Options. Right-click on the file, select Properties and uncheck "Read-only" then click OK.
You may like to make a backup of the file at this point to allow you to restore if you experience problems.

Open the file in Notepad and under the [operating systems] section you will find a list of all the installed operating systems.

If partitions have changed or you edited the boot.ini and the line defining the default has an error in it, you will get the existings options and an option labelled default. Correct the faulty "default" line and the extra faulty default option will disappear. It is something you cannot ignore because NT will boot using the info in the faulty default line until the error is corrected.

Microsoft's multi-boot support is very simple. It can not handle more than one non-NT/W2K operating system and it is limited to 10 entries in the menu. You will only see the 1st 10 entries displayed.:


NOTE:
If you just need to set the default operating system to boot, the easiest and safest approach is to click
Start > Control Panel > System icon > Startup/Shutdown dropdown > Select default


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Here are some sample boot.ini files to help you edit yours.



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This is a boot.ini file from a Windows XP Professional computer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a boot.ini file from a Windows 2000 Professional computer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This shows a boot.ini file for a dual boot PC with Windows XP Professional and Windows 2000 Professional
installed in two different partitions on the same hard drive (i.e. the first hard drive on primary IDE).
NOTE: The default OS is Windows XP Professional


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the same boot.ini file as above but the default OS is Windows 2000 Professional
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a boot.ini file for a triple boot PC with Win98SE, WinXP Pro and Win2k Pro installed
in three different partitions on the same hard drive (i.e. the first hard drive on primary IDE).
NOTE: The default OS is Windows XP Professional


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows 98se"




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a boot.ini file for a PC with WinXP Pro installed in 2 partitions on the same hard drive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional in Partition 1" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional in Partition 2" /fastdetect




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a boot.ini file for a PC with WinXP Pro installed in partition 1 on different hard drives.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional in Hard Drive 1" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional in Hard Drive 2" /fastdetect




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My boot.ini file - Win98SE in HDD:0-0 (master), WinXP PRo & Linux in different partitions in HDD:0-1 (Slave).
NOTE: The default OS is Microsoft Windows 98se


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code:
[boot loader]
timeout=15
default=C:\
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows 98se"
C:\man100.bin="Linux Mandrake 10.0"




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This shows a Boot.ini file for a PC with 2 copies of WinXP Pro, Win2k Pro and Win98SE installed in four different partitions on the same hard drive (i.e. the first hard drive on primary IDE). --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Code:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional in Partition 2" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional in Partition 3" /fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows 98se"
[any text]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional in Partition 4" /fastdetect



In the above example, the [any text] section hides the bottom selections.
You can use the [any text] header to keep the boot options but make them unavailable at boot time.
If you wish, you can use other descriptive text (e.g. "hidden options") instead of "any text".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: In the examples above Windows XP calls its install directory WINDOWS whereas Win2K calls it WINNT

 
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