Major BSOD Issues

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I’ll start from the beginning of the problem and go from there. My computer is an older HP running WinXP SP3. It was running with no problems. I had to unplug it to work on another computer for a friend. When I hooked everything back up I started getting BSOD errors. I unhooked it again and checked the memory and cables to make sure everything was seated properly. When I hooked it up again, no power at all. Completely dead. I then changed out the power supply. Got power but BSOD errors again. Next I decided to repair WinXP with the repair console. That did absolutely nothing for me but get me to a DOS prompt. I then decided to re-install XP. That went horribly wrong! It would boot up to the WInXP splash screen and then just a black screen. I then tried booting into safe mode to discover that setup ran fine but wouldn’t load any of the drivers for my sound, video, etc AND still get BSOD errors. I could boot into safe mode successfully though. At this point I’m about to reformat and start over but I decided to try the reinstall of XP one more time. Bad idea!! This time it boots up and I get a fast immediate flash of BSOD (too fast to even see what it says) and a reboot. It is now stuck in this cycle of reboot, BSOD, reboot etc. When it loads at start up it counts up the RAM as it should and finds CD drives and hard drives but when windows starts loading BSOD and reboot. Does anyone have any ideas before I throw this thing through a wall? LOL. Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you!
Dennis

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Hi Dennis,

You said you were able to get into Safe Mode. If you can get back into Safe Mode go to Control Panel>System>System Properties and click on the Advanced tab, and click on Settings under the Startup and Recovery section. Under the System Failure section uncheck the Automatically restart box and reboot the machine. Disabling Automatic restart should pause the BSOD so you can record any error messages that are displayed. This will be a good start toward a solution.

Also, you said “At this point I’m about to reformat and start over but I decided to try the reinstall of XP one more time.” Does this mean that your earlier reinstall of XP was a repair/reinstall rather than a completely fresh, new install? Just trying to get an accurate picture of events.

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I’ll try that and report the BSOD error message here.

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Couldn’t get back into safe mode so tried to put xp on a different partition. It went well until it tried to reboot then it couldn’t load windows because it was missing a file called Hal.dll. How do I get that file back?

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Couldn’t get back into safe mode so tried to put xp on a different partition. It went well until it tried to reboot then it couldn’t load windows because it was missing a file called Hal.dll. How do I get that file back?

Have a look here and see if anything works. WARNING: read the whole page then make an informed choice   from the options given. Let us know how you get on.

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I found that page too. I have tried all the options except the final solution. I guess that’s my next step. I’ll let you know how it works out.
Thanks
Dennis

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The above link to Kelly’s Korner is an excellent source for the HAL missing problem. 09/15/2006, it showed up in my Dell D800 following a MS Update with the first BSOD seen in twenty months. I used a recovery utility to boot to a previous (to the MS Update) load.

Recovery with the XP disk did not solve the problem, since Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL.dll) had several versions; XP, SP1, SP2 and the ServicePack version that somehow never made it into System32 from a two year ago MS Update..

I did use a portion of the “Final Solution” at bottom of Kelly’s page:

“…Hal.dll may or may not be found in WINDOWSSystem32 either way it’s no good.
A working copy of hal.dll WILL be found in “C:WINDOWSServicePackFilesi386” … COPY THAT FILE
And Paste it to “WINDOWSSystem32” folder; if it asks to overwrite say YES.”

The one existing in my System32 was a month older and 70% of the size of the version in my C:WINDOWSServicePackFilesi386, copy/paste/reboot ended in a reinstall of every single hardware driver.

System runs faster with less than half the average load on the CPU now and the reason it runs faster and with less ‘CPU Load’ is that it now no longer loads ACPI, (only “Power Option” is to show an icon) CPU now stays at 2GHz unless SpeedStep is disabled and then it stays at 599MHz.

Ever since my first “Phoenix Power Management” I have always thought that “Power Management” was more troublesome than it was worth, Standby was never used if I wanted best stability on next use anyway, I have not seen another BSOD (on this system) now for over three years.

Just in case anyone else gets the ‘HAL’ Crash, a better repair (than the ‘Kelly’ method linked above) would be a repair of the boot.ini from Recovery Console.

I have now run as a ‘PIC’ instead of ‘APIC’ (as I value stability over battery life) for the past 41 months and this five year old Latitude still runs longer on its original battery than I ever need it to.

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