There are occasions in which XP boot up with a black screen saying that your HAL.DLL is missing or corrupted, and you are unable to get into Windows due to this reason. To resolve this issue, you need a good HAL.dll file, which is available in “i386″ folder of Windows XP installation disc.

Our objective is to copy hal.dll from CD to C:\Windows\System32. To do so, there are two ways:

1. If you have another PC, connect the hard disk with issue to that PC and make it as secondary hard disk so that the system won’t boot into its partition. Then, insert XP CD and copy that file to x:\Windows\System32.

2. If you have no other PC, boot into Recovery Console of XP CD (make sure your XP CD is bootable). Type”R” to enter repair/console mode. When you eventually reached a command prompt, type in the following:

expand x:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll

in which x is your CDROM drive letter.

Restart your PC after that. Windows should be able to load by now. You may be prompted to install some drivers. Just let it install automatically (may take minutes to accomplish on slower machine).

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