Dell system consistantly reboots at start of boot

[kisk]

Have a system now that I'm working on that originally booted with an error saying hal.sys was missing or corrupt.

Booted with ERD and did a system restore to a previous point.

Now for the life of me I cannot get this to boot up in normal mode. After the POST it immediately reboots back to POST then to the "Start Windows Normally...,etc" screen. Will boot into safe mode just fine.

*Chkdsk was good
*Automatic reboot is disabled (Dumps aren't being produced)
*Ran Hiren's and checked for/removed viruses
*Disabled EVERY non-win/ms driver from loading with Autoruns
*Tried restoring back to different restore point

I'd rather learn whats going on here and fix it vs pave the drive as I've done one too many times.

Any suggestions?

 

[Morrison5891]

I'm thinking its actually Windows XP's boot.ini file and not the hal.dll file, which is often times the case. I'm thinking the bootcfg utility would be your best option here. From the recovery console, type bootcfg /rebuild

 

[kisk]

I looked at the boot.ini file while in safe mode and it didn't look to be out of the ordinary, but I will try the rc command and post back. Thanks

Just curious, whats the best way to find out which partition the os is on? The boot.ini file read (disk0, part2) .. but I'm not sure how I would know, and I suppose a different (default) boot.ini is used when booting into safe mode?

 

[kisk]

Unfortunately didn't work

Surely it has to be a driver or such loading with the system causing it to reboot as safe mode works great.

 

[B Trevathan]

Did you first try to extract HAL.DLL from the Windows CD? it will be in the i386 folder on the Windows CD named hal.dl_ just boot into the Recovery Console and extract it to System32 folder under the Windows folder on your hard drive.

For example, if your Windows CD is in drive D and Windows is installed on drive C, type extract D:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll

HAL is Microsoft's abbreviation for the Hardware Abstraction Layer, the technology and drivers that lets the Windows operating systems communicate with your PC's hardware.

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There is only one boot.ini file, only the OS load options part changes, yours may normally look like this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

if you use msconfig and select the /SAFEMODE option to boot into safemode it should look something like:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /SAFEMODE

The "rdisk(0)" refers to physical disk 1 (your hard drive) and partition(2) is the second partition on that drive, in other words you are loading Windows from the second partition on the first hard drive.

 

[Rodrick]

Spend a little google time on hall.dll replacement, there are a few different versions depending on the architecture (1 core or more for example). While the generic one is likely to get the system to boot, you'll be stuck with access to only one core. This is worth getting right.