hal.dll and forever reinstalling drivers

Snow

I got the hal.dll is missing or corrupt error message using winxp sp2, using recovery console I copied the hal.dll from sp2.cab in \windows\driver cache\i386\ to \windows\system32\ and rebooted

Windows boots up, it takes a lot longer after the loading screen but before the login screen.

As soon as I login, it starts saying new hardware found,

Sometimes its almost all my hardware(mouse, keyboard, graphics, ide) but almost always its just NForce 250 Serial ATA / Parallel ATA

Everything but the parallel ata will install, and the parallel ata gives a weird error message "this installation package is not supported by this processor type" (windows error code is 1633)

Rebooting just results in a re-run, uninstalling all hardware results in the same happening, tried re-installing nforce drivers, stll doesnt help.

Anyone got any ideas?

I'm thinking of making a second windows install to the same harddrive, and then copying it's hal.dll over

7aken

if hal.dll went missing it may have corrupted or changed some other registry entry. empahsise change because if it corrupted an entry you'd probably get a message.... try a system restore or try copying the core files over yourself.. prob lead to a bit more configuring but might fix it. just out of interest did it happen when you installed sp2?

hal.dll is the hardware application layer of the os and problems with it are usually caused by some major system change or 'trauma' ... anything weird happen to your machine or did the error just 'appear"

SouperComputer

hal.dll can popup with dodgy ram

run memtest86, or better still, prime95 to stress it and see if any errors occur

Snow

7aken wrote:

if hal.dll went missing it may have corrupted or changed some other registry entry. empahsise change because if it corrupted an entry you'd probably get a message.... try a system restore or try copying the core files over yourself.. prob lead to a bit more configuring but might fix it. just out of interest did it happen when you installed sp2?

hal.dll is the hardware application layer of the os and problems with it are usually caused by some major system change or 'trauma' ... anything weird happen to your machine or did the error just 'appear"

I upgraded my bios, which defaulted it's settings, and changed the boot order of the harddrives.

For whatever reason, this caused the hal.dll message to appear, until I changed back the boot order.

But I replaced hal before I realised this

SouperComputer wrote:

hal.dll can popup with dodgy ram

run memtest86, or better still, prime95 to stress it and see if any errors occur

RAM's fine, prime95 burn at priority 10 for 5 hours

There's a few different versions of hal.dll. One for APM, one for ACPI, one for ACPI with APIC, another for dual processor ACPI. Choosing a different HAL to the one that was previously installed will cause all of your devices to be redetected. I suspect you may have copied the wrong one.

The file you most likely need for an nForce 3 board is halaacpi.dll. Expand this from sp2.cab and rename it to hal.dll. Now copy it into C:\WINDOWS\system32 overwriting the existing one. Don't confuse it with halacpi.dll, there's two a's in the name.

Snow

IT WORKS thx mate, instead of using the recovery console to overwrite the current hal.dll, I just extracted halaacpi.dll to windows\system32\, and added "/hal=halaacpi.dll" to the boot.ini

If you extra all the hal*.dlls, you can do something like:

multi(x)disk(x)rdisk(x)partition(x)\WINDOWS="ACPI+APIC" /fastdetect /hal=halaacpi.dll
multi(x)disk(x)rdisk(x)partition(x)\WINDOWS="ACPI+PIC" /fastdetect /hal=halacpi.dll
multi(x)disk(x)rdisk(x)partition(x)\WINDOWS="non-ACPI" /fastdetect /hal=halpic.dll

and choose between them to see which works

SouperComputer

now thats interesting, im glad I followed this thread!