sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Computers & Programming Computers, Software, Accessories Windows XP Pro Updates

I hope this is a recoverable screw-up: I have a company notebook (Dell Latitude E5500) that I was using for a wireless survey. I needed to do some file management; figuring it would be easier to just use my desktop, I gave the notebook permissions to my wireless network (explicit MAC permissions).

I was doing my thing, but got tired around midnight, so figured I'd just shut it down and pick it up in the morning. I had not transferred my survey files to either a USB drive or my desktop (I usually move these files to the USB drive first).

So, Start|Shut Down Computer|Shut Down Computer. Turned back to my desktop for a few minutes, and when I turned back around to my notebook, it looked like it was hung up on shutdown (who HASN'T seen THIS happen?). Okay, far enough along, hit the button. Which, JUST before the power went off, showed "Installing Update 23 of 29." I never thought about Automatic Updates, or the fact that if it was on my network it would find the internet.

When I rebooted, I got a message about a bad or missing HAL.DLL.

Is this recoverable through the Recovery Console or some other means? I started looking at Microsoft's help site, but figured someone here must have encountered the same thing.

Thanks,
Bill

You should be able to copy the file from the XP CD.
I've done it with other files.

Thanks, Jeff. The notebook and I are going to my fiend's shop this afternoon to try just this. Frankly, if I can get my files off of the drive, I can just reinstall everything else needed. I'm thinking at his point of trying an "in-place setup" to just get all compatible files into the system, then do the updates.

Bill

Let me know if you need anymore help-feel free to shoot me an email
[email protected]

Been a while since I've had to do anything like this. When I got to my friend's shop and I booted the notebook, it blue-screened on me. We removed the hard drive and hung it onto a service PC with WIN XP Pro. My files were all recoverable (the ultimate goal...I didn't care if I had to re-load Windows at that point). Ran CHKDSK /F on the notebook from the service PC, put the drive back in the notebook and it worked fine.

Dagwood--I had seen this page and was ready to try Methods 2 and/or 3 until the blue screen came at me. At that point I really had no choice but to run CHKDSK; fortunately it worked. Oh, and I turned off Automatic Updates!

Thanks, guys.

Bill

Anytime, glad it works!