Not sure where else right now....I'm flipping out.Much traffic here, so hopefully an answer I did a bad thing. I am using Win XP Home. I had a hard drive that had Win98SE ion it from an old system. This had a ton of pictures my wife was saving, so I figured I would just put in my system as slave....well some how or another, XP decided I wanted dual boot, and whacked my boot up...no boot... came up with missing or corrupt HAL.DLL ... I scoured the web and tried everything...no matter what, no fix. I even extracted it from my install CD and copied it ... plus all kinds of system recovery work. Fuinally got desparaste and tried a new install/repair...this did not work. Then I finally gave in after 6 hours and ended up reformatting my C drive partition and reinstalled XP...when it came to reboot the first time, that error again came up, even with formatting. Now I'm thinking I got a virus or something from that old hard drive... I don't know, but absolutely nothing I have tried has fixed this, even with reinstall. Any ideas ????? I have tried reformatting and install couple of times. Then tried running virus check via DOS/floppy ... the disk is dorked up.... need to buy some more floppies tomorrow and try again with that. Even deleted anbd created a new boot sector

Let me get this straight. Do you have two physical harddisks in your machine, connected to the same IDE cable? In that case, check the master/slave settings. Older hard drives don't support the cable select mode, you'll have to set the jumpers to master mode or slave mode. I guess you want to keep your original drive as the first drive (master) in your system, and that old hard drive as secondary (slave) drive. When you've checked the jumper settings and they're OK, try to boot from a DOS floppy disk (preferably DOS 6) and run fdisk/mbr. That'll write a clean master boot record on your drive. Hope this helps, Steven.

HAL.dll (I think) refers to the hardware abstraction layer. If you've redone the partition and reformatted, the only way you could get a virus back is if your bakcups (you made backups, right?) had infected files on in.
I'm having a little trouble following this. As I understand it, you put the 2nd driver (slave) with Win 98, and your master (XP), got corrupted. It almost sounds like your system tried to put Win 98 files on your XP boot sector (? doesn't really make sense, but please straighten me out..;)
If you've deleted the partition, and reformatted with the install disk, it should boot up just fine, once the OS is loaded. Back in the old days, you could use the 2nd copy of the sector tables (or whatever they're called nowadays, this is FAT stuff) by using the DOS command fdisk /mbr.
If you have another working computer around, you might peruse the Web for a Hard Disk diagnostic utility. Dell used to make one for authorized techs, but I'm sure the vendor who made the hard drive would have one as well. I've known hard drives not to 'travel well' from one system to another, and fail upon putting in a 'new' system.
Failing that, have you tried putting the Win 98 drive back in the old system? just a thought. We'll help, but we may need more info to find out what you've got going.

Attached Link: http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm

First, remove your wife's hard disk before you do anything else. A virus is possible, but highly unlikely. What probably caused you grief was an incorrect BOOT.INI file, not the HAL.DLL file. Editing BOOT.INI files is a bit esoteric, but I've attached a link to an informitive page. Before you formatted your hard drve, did you delete all partitions and recreate them? If you did have a MBR virus this would get rid of it. Please don't be offended, but I think formatting your hard drive could have been a bit premature.

well, I did read and do all the stuff on the link page kellys corner. I had taken the second drive out right away when my system wouldn't boot. I had a different slave drive before. I took it out and installed the old one, which was also configured as slave. What I have is my main hard drive with a 25gig partition which is only system stuff. The remainder id for programs. Now, even after reformatting that partition, the OS install copies files and then does a reboot. When it reboots, that error of the missing or corrupted hal.dll comes up...over and over. I deleted the boot.ini, rebuilt the bootcfg, etc etc ...many times. its as if there is something not being erased .... As far as reformatting, I tried desparately not to. I lost a tonn of personal pictures of family, all me email and some other stuff, sch as web page etc... and yes, I feel about as stupid as possible for that, as I knew the stuff shoudl have been backed up. Now I'm wondering if I will fget it going again.

Also, the old Hard drive was removed from a system I got rid of ... its just the fact it had a ton of family pictures on it and my wife wanted them, so I thought it would be easy enough to just install it as slave on my system and save the files to CD. Alas, when the system booted, it for whatever reason saw that drive with the OS and did something to the config or something. it actually attempted to load the 98 that was on it, but asked for a system CD. I hit exit and when the reboot came about the missing/corrupted hal.dll error came up.

This may or may not help, but here are a couple of suggestions. Firstly, shut down the system totally, unplug it, and open the case. Disconnect every single wire, card, and memory, then put it all back tightly. I cannot count how many times I ran into problems after putting something new inside my system, where I nudged a memory stick, or the IDE cable and it was just a tad loose. Also, make sure that Win98 drive is not in there anymore. Next, as soon as you start up the system, go into the BIOS. Usually you would hit F1 or Del key to do it. (You should get a message on screen for the correct key.) Once in there, you should have an option somewhere to Load Failsafe Defaults. Choose this option, save the changes, and exit. While you are in there though, you may want to see if the system still "sees" another physical disk. Make sure it only sees the one actually in there. Once the computer gets past the initial memory test, start tapping on your F8 key. You should get a boot options menu. If you do, choose Safe Mode. This should load Windows with the least overhead possible. Once you get into Windows, open the Control Panel. Then open the System option. Go to Hardware->Device Manager. Make sure through there that all of the hardware is being seen by Windows. If it is, try rebooting again, without Safe Mode. If something has a problem, say, the network card isn't being seen correctly or something to that effect, shut down, remove the problem device, then try booting again. I can't guarantee any of this will help, but at this point, it is worth a shot.

Deleting the boot.ini is a bad idea, I had a real dual boot system and deleting the boot ini stopped either version of windows loading (I was trying to get rid of one version of windows).

In the boot sequence, before it gets to trying to load windows does it show that it's recognuizing the drive correctly (right IDE channel type & size?) If not, then you need to set that correctly in the BIOS setup. I don't know anything about the newer SATA drives, were you using a SATA and the old one was IDE? If you've well and truly tried all the software options then some hardware config or error seems like the only other possibility. If the data is valuable to you it may be time to call in the techs, though I'd steer clear of the chain stores where it's hit or miss at best.

When you boot from the XP installation CD, you have the option of installing Windows to another partition than the default. You can change the partitions using that option. Delete the old C:partition, then recreate it and do an NTFS full format. You'll keep the other partitions, and anything corrupted on your system partition will be gone. If the hardware is OK, this should work, and the stuff on your other partitions will be safe.

As already mentioned, have you tried "fdisk /mbr" from a DOS/Win98 boot floppy? Rebuilding the bootcfg or using fixmbr from the recovery console in XP may not be enough. XP will not forget previously identified partitions, unless you get fdisk to overwrite the entire MBR. It is possible XP is looking for something in the wrong place.

if I fdisk, will I then lose all my other partitions as well? I'm trying very hard to not lose the rest.

If you use "fdisk /mbr" you will not lose partitions, only the MBR is rewritten. However, it is always best to backup anything important before doing anything on such a base level. That said, I have never had any problems with "fdisk /mbr". Hope this works for you. After you get things to work, make sure you run chkdsk on all of your partitions. There are bound to be some lost clusters somewhere after all this trouble.

thanks everyone for the suggestions. UPDATE: I have finally managedd to get XP reinstalled, but of course much updating had to be done. The error still persists, but I'm now able to boot from the CD, but not hard drive. I'm going to back up what is left, then try the fdisk/MBR deal to see if that clears it up. Otherwise, I may go ahead and zap everything and start over from deep scratch. The real bummer in all this is the fact I KNOW the importance of backing up data, and have warned people about that for quite some time, but I've gotten a bit lazy and have let things slide for awhile... and now have lost many family pictures, etc etc ... lesson learned for the very last time. It won';t happen again

ok .. all is now back up ... when i intalled that win98 drive, it changed it to active... so when i out the original drive back, it was still listed as active .... for whatever and whyever that matters, but I found instructions on how to make it inactive, and now all works,. as someone above stated, I probably reformatted for nothing...maybe that would have fixed it and I wouldn't have lost everything. It will never happen again

Sounds like maybe the BIOS didn't recognize the disk swapping correctly somehow. Always good to check and see what the BIOS configuration says when swapping disks around. We alll learn from these unfortunate episodes. Glad you finally got it working.

Nine times out of ten you shouldn`t reformat your hard disk even if there is a virus you should try and find it and remove it instead.