Marilyn,
     I have seen this issue a few times with XP.  Two causes that I
have had on separate machines were as follows.

1) The boot.ini file got modified so the bootup process becomes unsuccessful.

2) There have been bad sectors on the hard drive where the file was
stored and the hard drive need to be replaced.

That is just my experience, yours may differ.

sincerely,
Derek


> From:    Marilyn Leathers <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Missing windows system32 hal.dll file
>
> Hello All,
>        I have a friend pc that is running Windfows XP Media Center
> Edition that is missing the hal.dll file. The computer will not boot
> off of the recovery disk nor can I bring the system up in safe mode.
>    Most of my research says that I should fix ther boot.ini file with
> a recovery console. Well, the system will not run the system recovery
> disk. I keep getting the same error that hal.dll is missing.
>    I'm thinking abou taking the hard drive out of the freinds
> computer and putting in my computer as a slave and fix the problem of
> the missing file. Any suggestions would be appreciated of the
> quickest method of fixing the problem of the missing hal.dll file.
>
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