[biest3000]

Hi,

I have installed Windows XP on my MAC PRO using bootcamp 3 times by now. Without a formatting I had a special problem to be ignored. However, with full formatting I successfully installed Windows XP and all
upgrades just went fine. Until after about 4 hours of installation and frequent rebooting I suddenly get the
famous "hal.dll missing" message, unrecoverable I guess and I am dead! So basically boot camp seems so beta that it is useless?

Technical details:
I reserved half of my disk 250GBytes for Windows and formatted as NTFS. I have installed
tons of packages: FrameMaker, Illustrator, Mathematica, MS Office 2003, MS Visual Studio, Seamonkey etc
without any apparent problem until the break-down happens!

My questions:
- Has anybody experienced a similar behavior?
- Is there any way to "repair" hal.dll? My impression is that there is nothing wrong with it really?
- Is there anything to be avoided to safeguard from this disaster?
- Is it still too early for Windows on MAC other than "Parallel System" which seems to be fine albeit slow?

Cheers and Many Thanks in advance!

[ghporter]

hal.dll is the library that the OS uses to figure out which particular "hardware abstraction layer" to use to talk with the computer's hardware. It is critical to the functioning of the OS. And there is little you can do to "fix" it.

You can, however, reinstall Windows over itself in what is often called a "repair installation." This basically rewrites any files that have become corrupt or are somehow missing.

Be very careful with what applications you install, though. Just because the hardware is Mac doesn't mean that it's "Windows proof." You can have exactly the same kinds of software problems ANY Windows installation can have, so be cautious and read all the documentation before you install stuff that actually affects the OS directly.

And your problem is far from typical. Boot Camp is a pretty good product according to the vast majority of users.

Good luck with the repair installation.

[jamil5454]

When you install Bootcamp and repartition your disk for Windows, a few partitions are created. Make sure you don't reformat/combine these partitions in the Windows installer before installing Windows. Instead, just use the large partition Bootcamp created for you. Otherwise, you'll probably get hal.dll errors.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by jamil5454 

When you install Bootcamp and repartition your disk for Windows, a few partitions are created. ... . Otherwise, you'll probably get hal.dll errors.

Can you elaborate? I haven't taken the plunge yet (too much school for time to play with it) and this stuff should probably be in a sticky. What other partitions are created and what are they called?

[biest3000]

Hi,

I will try the repair installation if possible.

However,

a) I know that the hall.dll is still there!
b) Question remains why suddenly this "dll" gets missing? Never happens on PCs of course!
c) To me it really looks like a major flaw of bootcamp and I hope somebody else might suffer
from that as well so that one could identify WHY this happens after so many happy reboots!
d) Might it be possible that other users simply haven't done a major installation effort such
that the problems remains hidden?

Cheers!

[mark.s]

Hi,

This is a general Windows issue, so I wouldn't go blaming BootCamp.

I've had this happen on an HP desktop before. If you Google it you'll find it's a fairly common occurrence on (non Apple) PCs. You could look at your boot.ini and see if the problem lies there.

FWIW, I'm using BootCamp to run Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 and haven't had this problem.

Mark

[ghporter]

Mark.s is correct, this DOES happen on Windows now and then. Almost always it's because of a hard drive problem (typically a logical/formatting problem). In fact, it's a good indicator that a hard drive is going bad when you get this indication after you've been running Windows a while.

As for what to look for in boot.ini, you want to see what device is selected for the boot drive. If it isn't the right one, then booting will stop when a file is not found-and of course hal.dll is an important file early in the boot process. Here's Microsoft's instructions for editing a boot.ini file. Note that it's a simple text file, so if you have access to the drive from OS X you can read and edit it.

[snez]

Same problem here, I solved it by:
1. Reboot into osx
2. Run boot camp and restore the hdd to single drive
3. Reboot, re-run bootcamp and recreate the 32gb windows partition
4. Start the installation, format the new partiton to ntfs and proceed normally

mark.s, I don't think this is a windows issue, it seems like a flaw on how macs read the ntfs filesystem, or the partition size is relevant, cause bootcamp creates a 30935MB partition for windows and wastes another 128MB, while my previous partition was using all of them.

Also, I hate to ask this, but do you guys know of any way to make the HDD boot selection at startup show up by default?

[msuper69]

Originally Posted by snez 

...
Also, I hate to ask this, but do you guys know of any way to make the HDD boot selection at startup show up by default?

I don't know why you hate to ask but the only way I know of to select the boot system at startup is to hold down the option key while restarting.

[snez]

msuper69, mainly because as a first timer on macs I keep seeing wrong design decisions of the system. It is significant for an operating system to choose the right defaults, like being able to select the OS to boot into without having to browse through their bad documentation trying to figure out which is the option key and how do I restart the system and all those little things that should be more accessible. The right defaults affect how the users use the system and thats what will make them talk about how easy it is to use. So I hate to ask this because their system design has forced me to sign up to a community forum to ask this question which as it seems, its a feature that does not exist, on a system that calls the BIOS in the company's website as 1980's technology that noone should use anymore. Whats the logic behind that statement anyway?!

[rockwild]

Originally Posted by snez 

msuper69, mainly because as a first timer on macs I keep seeing wrong design decisions of the system. It is significant for an operating system to choose the right defaults, like being able to select the OS to boot into without having to browse through their bad documentation trying to figure out which is the option key and how do I restart the system and all those little things that should be more accessible. The right defaults affect how the users use the system and thats what will make them talk about how easy it is to use. So I hate to ask this because their system design has forced me to sign up to a community forum to ask this question which as it seems, its a feature that does not exist, on a system that calls the BIOS in the company's website as 1980's technology that noone should use anymore. Whats the logic behind that statement anyway?!

There is a way to do it. It is called the Startup Disk control panel. If you open it, it gives you the option of the available boot disks and you can select a default or select one and then tell it to restart in to it.

[svtcontour]

I've been building PC's for ever and and have built probably > 500 between my own small business, my 9-5 job and my computer for myself and friends and the only time I've ever seen hal.dll go 'missing' was due to HD corruption and honestly, I've seen this only once.

Did anything funky happen somehow like maybe drive letters changing on the boot drive on anything crazy like that?