HAL is missing

No this is not a reference to the errant HAL9000 computer from 2001 A Space Odyssey, but the failure of Windows XP to boot with the following message: "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: windows\system32\hal.ddl. Please re-install a copy of the above file."

Now when a customer gets this and the usual chkdsk doesn't fix it, it usually means a re-install of Windows over the existing version or a complete disk format and reload of the whole systems software and appplications. Both mean a fair amount of work, which is often difficult to justify on an old computer. So I looked for another solution.

This worked: boot the system into the Recovery Console and then reset the file attributes of boot.ini, if it exists so that you can delete it.
C:> attrib -h -r -s boot,ini
C:> del boot.ini

Then re-create it using the following:
C:>bootcfg /rebuild
selecting the Windows installation, give it a name and /fastdetect as the usual option. Finally reload the hard disk boot block with:
C:>fixboot

This will usually create a working boot.ini and the system will reboot normally. If not try to replace hal.dll from the Windows Setup CD-ROM by:
C:>expand d:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll

In my case the boot.ini file was being repeatedly deleted by malware, so running Malwarebytes' Antimalware program fixed that too.

So that's how to open the pod bay doors!