Hal.dll Issue

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My upgraded computer crashed with the error message that the hal.dll was
missing or corrupted.



Background information:

I decided to upgrade one of my computers with a larger (160GB) hard drive,
the PC supports 48bit LBA. I also decided to do a clean install of Windows
XP Pro. The first thing I did was to take the larger drive and connect it as
slave to my main PC in order to format and partition it. To my surprise
there was a copy of Windows already installed.

I deleted the boot partition and reformatted it as it was too small for my
use.



Next I installed the drive and then installed Windows XP Pro using an
Upgrade CD (take note that it did not ask for a previous version of Windows
during the install, something even I missed until after it crashed). Next I
installed SP2 and all the security updates using Windows Update site. After
using the PC for a few minutes it crashed when I clicked on the Back button
while browsing the web. Rebooting displayed the hal.dll error message, it
would not boot to safe mode.



Used my other PC to find info about this error message and one article I
read said a third party software tool like MaxBlast could be the problem. I
then used the recovery console and sure enough I did report a non standard
MBR. Fixed this issue and then re-installed Windows and ran burn-in software
for about 8 hours without any problems.



Do you think MaxBlast was the problem and why didn't Windows ask for a
previous version of the product the first time around even though I deleted
the original partition and reformatted (full format option and not the quick
format) the drive?



Long winded but thanks for any replies

Jim


.

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