Unable to reboot from disc

[colliecrew]

Hi everyone.

As a favour to a work colleague I offered to try and speed up his exceedingly slow pc. After doing this I noticed he had 2 Windows XP Home Editions during start up. After doing a wee bit of reading I discovered this was down to a partition error. However, on trying to solve this I have caused this:

 

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt.

Windows root\system32\hal.dll.

Please re-install a copy of the above file.

 

So after more reading I discovered the solution to this, is to reinstall the missing or corrupt files. Sound easy until the pc won't reboot with the CD.

I've checked the BIOS to ensure it's booting from the CD, but still no joy.

 

Can anyone help???? PLEASE

[Dalo Harkin]

Have you set the CD/DVD rom drive as the 1st bootable device.

 

'normal method' would be:-

CD/DVD ROM

HDD

Floppy (these are now only used on pre Vista systems)

Removable device (only used with bootable USBs etc)

Boot from Ethernet (on workstation PCs/Servers etc)

 

I advise people:-

HDD

Disable

Disable

Disable

Disable

 

Then you can just change the 1st to CD/DVD rom when booting an OS, it saves any conflicts and avoids the delays in the post