hal.dll is missing

Hi,

I am having a Dell laptop running with Windows XP Home edition with service pack 3. Since last two days whenever I boot the laptop, before desktop appears I use to get the following error message:

“<something>/system32/hal.dll is either missing or corrupt.”

When I checked the file size it is exactly the same as in previous backup. So do you guys think the file is corrupted? As per troubleshooting, I already tried running "sfc /scannow" thinking it will fix the system files but no success.

I wanted to know few more things regarding this as is hal.dll within one of the cabinets under I386? How do I determine the location of hal.dll? Is there a search command for hal.dll?

Somebody please help me out to get rid of this error. Many Thanks.

I am bit confused. Are you able to boot the system after that error message? If not then how could you run SFC if you can't boot the computer? Anyways, the cause of the mentioned error message use to be probably corrupt boot.ini file Or if the boot.ini file not having a correct ARC path to the Windows installation.

If it is so, then you dont need to worry because this can be fixed easily by following the steps mentioned in the following article: http://support.microsoft.com/search/...=&mode=r&lsc=0

Thank you very much for the help friend. I checked that URL and i guess it will fix the problem. I'll try out the steps mentioned tonight and let you know the results. Hope it helps.

Help appreciated.