Need help repairing system

[Thorn of Death]

I've messed up with my video card, and I forced it to directx 9 in HL2. Then when I left the computer and came back, it had a dos error. I restarted it and it was trying to boot from the CD. I fixed it by making the hard disk run as the first booting device. (the way it was first. don't know how it changed.)

Problem Fixed.


Then, steam games wouldn't run. I thought the problem was with steam, because it was the program I was experimenting on. But to make sure I ran another one.

The computer restarted and sounded as though it shut down. I don't know what happened. Then XP wouldn't run, saying that the file windows/system32/hal.dll is corrupt or missing.

I booted from my XP CD, and pressed R to repair the problem in the semi-dos console mode, and got the missing/corrupt file from another computer.

I couldn't copy the file into the windows directory, because it said: access denied. So I tried the command "logon", it would just read for a few seconds, and do nothing. I tried "logon admin" and "logon administrator", but nothing. Not even a message.

I decided to reinstall windows. But then, it told me it was going to delete all profiles and all files in "my documents". I said **** ** and stopped the setup program.

The only thing I haven't tried is booting from a 98 startup disk.

Please tell me what to do.

 

[short recoil]

Sounds like you will have to reinstall Xp..........think yourself lucky mate, i had to reinstall windows 20 times in a row ( on a 60gb hard disk) to work out a defective part of the computer.
That was 2 days solid of annoyance with computer.

 

[Thorn of Death]

But it tells me I'll lose all my profiles and documents. I mean, come on. I wouldn't do that no matter what it meant.

All I need is to replace the tiny file.

 

[duffers20]

I have had this problem in the past with XP. I found a tutorial on how to replace corrupt or missing system files on the net, I will have a look but it was hard to find it in teh first place so I might not be able to. It basically told you how to back up the original one (don't know why really since it will be corrupt) and replace it with a copy from your winXP cd. I had to do it for about 5 or 6 files but I eventually got it to work.

I found this help page from m$ that might help, but I will try and find that tutorial on how to fix your prob as I know how annoying it is!

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330184

Hope this helps

--duffers20

EDIT: I just found this, which might help you:

This same thing happened to me. I solved it by putting my WinXP CD in the CD drive
and typing the following:

extract d:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll

Windows XP booted right up!

I don't know if you want to trust this, but it may help. That quote was taken from teh following website:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1062736001

 

[Thorn of Death]

Thanks, I got it working.

However, my computer crashed again and would never start up again. It won't even reinstall XP even though I decided that I don't want anymore files, just my computer back.

You know what this ****ing Microsoft product did when I wanted to reinstall xp? it said: deleting old windows installation. Then it couldn't create a certain directory which was essential for the installation, and it just quit!

So now I don't have a windows installation and I can't install it. **** xp.