HAL Missing or corrupt/ Windows does not start

[jolawry]

Windows of my fairly new laptop has stopped loading and every time I try to start windows, the system does a crash dump. I tried doing a system recovery to no avail. Can somebody please advice?

Thank you

[Blencogo]

Hi jolawry and welcome.

This message can mean HAL.DLL has become corrupt but most commonly it is because the system configuration has changed (drive partition created or deleted) and boot.ini cannot find your operating system because it is looking in the wrong place.

What model Vaio do you have?
Are you running Vista or XP?
Have you created or deleted any hard drive partitions recently?
Do you have a good firewall and anti-virus software?
Have you had a virus recently?

You will need to repair or reconfigure boot.ini using a bootable CD.