Pretty much what the title says.
Got a gentlemen who I'm trying to fix his comp.
It's an older Athlon 64 Compaq tower running XP Home.
Microsoft wireless notebook intelli mouse 3000, couple of external drives.
He went to install a new external drive, system froze up and he shut it
down via the kill switch. When it booted he tried safe mode and it says
hal.dll is missing or corrupt, system won't boot.
I got into it today, tried rebuilding the MBR, tried a fixboot, replacing the
hal.dll by putting the HD into another machine as slave (all files were present)
and it still wouldn't work.
Ending up rebuilding the boot.ini via the recovery console, then doing a Windows repair
to wipe out the system files. Everything short of the fact the system needed about 200 updates,
was pretty good.
However still had a wireless mouse issue, pretty straightforward and detailed on the web.
Except the install for the update / new drivers will never complete. It ends in error, no details.
Each time the system gets to windows, it tries to reinstall this particular part of the mouse, even though
it's working on screen, and ends in error.
So I went to try running in a diagnostic/safe mode, after that the hal.dll issue returned. You have to rebuild the boot.ini
every time the system starts, or it'll be stuck at the error.
System restore of course, doesn't have any points prior to today, now that I did the repair.
I've run out of tools to try, so I'm looking for new ideas.
What would cause the boot.ini to corrupt at every boot (or possibly during shut down)?
