What Happened to HAL?

[AHadley]

I booted my system up this morning only to find it complaining of a certain missing system boot DLL. My first thought was 'well, I'm sure I'm better off without him', but soon began to think 'oh sh*t'. I've had this on XP and it's fairly easy to fix, and indeed there are tutorials all over the internet, but in W7 I have no idea. Does anybody else have a solution, or at least know where to look for one?

[VSMIT]

HAL was taken offline, and eventually merged with Star Child David Bowman, creating Halman.  Oh, wait, you're talking about the Hardware Abstraction Layer.

[S.cavA.rmyG.en]

HAL was taken offline, and eventually merged with Star Child David Bowman, creating Halman.  Oh, wait, you're talking about the Hardware Abstraction Layer.

grate.

more on topic me bro deleted one of the system DLL's so I am trying to fix that on his computer.
much the same problem but I think your better off then I am in the long run IE: you got the name of the dll you need to fix.I do not.
don't ask about my bro and why he did it.

[sabrebattletank]

Reinstall? Can you do a "restore the operating system but keep all my files" restore? I did that once in Vista. It was nice.

[AHadley]

SAG, how am I supposed to copy the file over when the computer won't boot? I'm looking for command prompt things

SBT, I think there is but I don't want to risk it because it will overwrite the stuff I have added to my system but don't want to remove. I'll go for that if the people at microsoft don't come up with something.

[technoid]

You might have to boot into recovery mode (not the same as safe mode).  I've only done it once awhile ago, it's somewhat involved, you'll need to do some reading first.  Might also have to go back to an earlier restore point.

Edit:  Oops, yeah, I don't know if you can boot into that with HAL gone, haven't tried it myself, heh.

[AHadley]

You might have to boot into recovery mode (not the same as safe mode).  I've only done it once awhile ago, it's somewhat involved, you'll need to do some reading first.  Might also have to go back to an earlier restore point.

Edit:  Oops, yeah, I don't know if you can boot into that with HAL gone, haven't tried it myself, heh.

Can't get into any recovery mode that I'm aware of. Can boot from my disk.

Would have gone for restore points already, had some idiot not deleted them with CCleaner.

[S.cavA.rmyG.en]

I am not runing windows 7 but if you can boot from disk their should be some kind of recovery consoul on the disk if not you will probly need to order a system recovery disk from microsoft and yes this is often a command prompt progarm that boots off the disk you buy.
but becouse I am not running the same OS I don't know all the commands you will need to fix you computer when and if you get a system recovery disk from microsoft.
I do think it will run some vesion of fixdisk but agen I don't know becouse I am not running the same OS.
try that out a bit if microsoft tec support dose not fix it some other way but I think thay are just going to do about the same thing only you don't buy the disk from them.

[AHadley]

Recovery console has not been in any Windows OS since XP MCE. It's been replaced with WinRE, which I have no idea how to access. I can get command prompt on the disk though.

[AHadley]

Double-post to bump.

This error does not occur in Windows 7 and the file cannot be copied from a CD. Reinstall Windows 7.

This is crap - I'm not about to lose all my files. Anybody have a solution?

EDIT: A very helpful friend of my dad's suggested try to repair my MBR... and if that failed said to install W7 to a different drive and copy the file across, and if that doesn't work clone my files to it - he even told me where I can find my registry so I can copy it across like any other set of files

[technoid]

Can you not install Win7 (or XP) on another drive, put that into your PC as the boot drive, then turn that broken drive into an external drive and get your files off it?   I don't know about W7, but I've done that with crashed XP (and earlier Windows version) drives and it works for me.  These OSes have gotten more & more complex (since Win 3.x) that disk issues have become harder to fix.  Plus the fact W7 is still a new product, so probably not enough similar occurrences from other people reporting.  Since this is basically a 'file missing' issue, I think it should work.  Only when the drive has a physical ailment should it not work and a recovery service is needed.  Of course, it depends on how misbehavin' W7 is when turned into said secondary drive, external or not.

[AHadley]

It was all fixed briefly - for about three hours. Next time I tried to boot up, I reached the boot screen before crashing out and rebooting. Plugged the HD into a USB caddy and it's corrupt and unreadable. Sending it off for data recovery if it's possible, and putting W7 on another 40GB HD i've got.

I'm afraid it's total loss at the moment. Thank god I made an SVN commit before going down.

[Nielk1]

Be lucky that HDD recovery of non mechanical failures is quite cheap.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

One way to recover your precoius files is to take out the drive and put it in an internal/external drive enclosures and install that in another working computer; much like installing as a new cd/dvd drive configured as a secondary slave.

I recently tried installing a cd burner on one of my systems, but alas the drive was too long to fit in the bay, so I mistakenly forced it past a capsitor on the mother board; damaging it apparently beyond repair.

Anyways, back to your problem once I installed the drive as mentioned aboved I was able to access the drives contents without a problem. My unit is an internally mounted model that takes up a 5 and one quarter inch bay and hooks via an IDE cable. If you can't find one of these try buying an externally mounted USB or a 1394 firewire type to attempt the same thing; if you have the ports. BNG. 

[S.cavA.rmyG.en]

Recovery console has not been in any Windows OS since XP MCE. It's been replaced with WinRE, which I have no idea how to access. I can get command prompt on the disk though.

yes but Recovery disks have been in every Windows OS.
I know windows 7 hase at lest one.