Who Took My Hal.DLL ?

I was looking forward to a nice, relaxing weekend. In efforts to decrease my stress levels – I was planning on spending the entire weekend planting and fussing with pretty things in the new flower bed that I built a few weeks ago. (I’m still holding off until Memorial Day Weekend to plant anything in the veggie garden — in Wisconsin, you cannot be 100% sure winter is over until the end of May).

As my workday on Friday wound down to an end – I rebooted my computer. That was my first mistake – – but it was running sluggish and was obviously unhappy and in need of a reboot. Once it rebooted, I was met with the following error:

“Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.”

huh.

I rebooted again – sometimes Windows is just stupid, ya know? I thought it was a glitch – – I mean – I certainly didn’t do anything to my hal.dll file! So I reboot – and got the same error. Ugh.

I did the following – and STILL got the error:

• Rebooted with my XP recovery disk
• Attempted recovery
• Used my XP CD and rebuilt the boot.ini file
• Expanded the hal.dll file from the XP CD into the \windows\system32\ directory

Sigh – I was getting no love from Microsoft products! No matter what I did – my PC kept telling me that my hal.dll file was either gone or corrupted.

Luckily, back in March, when I rebuilt my computer with all sorts of new equipment – I used a RAID set up. I proceeded to boot my system with the mirrored drive – to which my system promptly told me that both arrays were degraded. DEGRADED! In big, ugly red letters, too – I guess that adds insult to injury.

To make a long story short – I set my mirrored drive as the boot drive and it booted just fine. I deleted the previous drive (the one that USED to be the boot drive but was now missing hal.dll). Then, I made a complete and total backup of my system. Then I rebuilt the array so that I, once again, had a boot drive and a mirrored drive and could begin functioning somewhat normally again.

The 95GB backup creation took a good amount of time. Rebuilding the array took forEVER. It’s almost noon on Sunday and I’m finally done and back to where I started (or ended?) on Friday afternoon. Yes, of course – before you ask, this is exactly the way I wanted to spend my weekend….NOT!

I’m sure there is an easier way I could have proceeded with this fix. I was, however, desperate not to do a new install of XP at any cost.

I did get some planting done, though – in between backups, rebuilds, etc – I spend a good amount of time outside on Saturday. Without sunscreen, of course – so now I look like a lobster. I really need to learn that whole sunscreen lesson someday.

And finally – here’s a picture of my new birdie friend, Jingles. I’ve discovered she LOVES to go into the shower with me. I can hold her under the shower for hours and hours and she’d be perfectly happy. After we were done – she sat on my shoulder and just preened and preened….and made herself a little tent with my hair: