i have fux0red my computer!!

so... i installed a new copy of winXP on a different partition. (that's where i am now) and i tried copying THIS version of that .dll to the old partitions \system32 folder. that did not work, it said the same thing.

and if you want to laugh at me or scold me, yes this is all happening because i just got partition magic. oh what a fool i am. actually it was all going great until i started installing a second copy of the OS on the new partition, then chickened out. that's when it got messed up.

oh it said < windows root >system32\hal.dll -- the ilxor thought it was a tag

Oh dear.

If you used partition magic, your only problem may be that your system is trying to boot from the wrong hard disk. You'll want to check to see if you have a boot.ini, if you can even get access to the c:\boot.ini file (from an emergency disk or a Win98 boot disk, if your drive is formatted in Fat32). You can try checking here for more info.

Why are you using Partition Magic, if I may ask?

well,

i have access to all the files, just not the old OS installation. i'll look at the boot.ini file. the feeling that i'm getting is that it's not so much a problem of the particular file being corrupted as some flag somewhere telling the computer that the file is corrupted, if that makes any sense.

andrew, i was in particular hoping you might have some ideas :-) i hope "oh dear" isn't all you have? ;-) aargh.

i thought that i could improve the functionality of the comp by partitioning my 80g drive. improving speed of accessing the drive by using smaller partitions for different purposes, like audio recording. i was also interested in having a second "clean" installation of XP to use for audio stuff, without all of the crap i have installed now that is slowing the system down. i am still unclear on whether i am even allowed to have two XP installations on this one machine. i fear not. i know i couldn't install on another machine without buying a second license.

also, i would have liked to have a linux installation maybe, to play around with.

what would happen if i reinstalled windows on the original partition? would i still have all of the programs that are installed in that setup? i am assuming that all of my windows settings would revert, which would REALLY SUCK because it has of course been a rather long process of turning off features and tweaking XP to get it where i had it yesterday. sob

i could get a second HD and use it to reconstruct

that looks very promising, sean. i will give it a try. unfortunately my dsl lost sync just as i was needing to start searching about the hal.dll error...

what would happen if i reinstalled windows on the original partition? would i still have all of the programs that are installed in that setup? i am assuming that all of my windows settings would revert, which would REALLY SUCK because it has of course been a rather long process of turning off features and tweaking XP to get it where i had it yesterday. sob
If you reinstall it clean, it may force you to reinstall everything, but you may be okay if you choose the "repair" option during the XP install process...but it will require you to reactivate WinXP. It's not the "repair from console" option, but the one a couple steps further in.

i have just sorted it, and i am now in my original XP installation

YAY

here's what it was, very much in line with yr link, sean:

i had created a small 50mb FAT partition at the front of the disk to hold the bootmagic stuff. this moved my original partition to position (2) on the disk. my boot.ini had that OS set as partition(1) so changing that to (2) fixed it.

well, this was frustrating, but on the upside, i feel like i have learned a lot in the past 12 hours!

thanks everyone, esp sean! i would still like to know if i can have a second xp installation under my orig license/registration. i might just try to register this second one i have and see what happens. maybe a little bit of research first...

i must say, i don't really understand the point of bootmagic, because you can choose between operating systems already. i don't think at this point that i will remove it, i'll just leave well enough alone since i'm back up and running.

well, i now have a second really stripped down installation of xp with only my audio programs on it (and opera - shit, i can't front on opera!) it seemed to take the activation of the new windows install OK...

phew

It probably wouldn't have been a problem because it would be using, essentially, the same set of hardware. You're allowed a certain number of re-activations before it starts to worry...even then if you have a legitimate reason (swapping out hardware because it keeps crashing) they generally don't give you too much guff, even over the phone. As long as it's legitimate. =)

hal.dll: what are you doing, ron?

"i think you'd better take a pill and try to calm down, ron" or something

what made me nervous about the second installation, beyond all of the talk you hear about the oppressive xp activation stuff - it specifically says in the eula thingy "one intallation on one computer", but anyways it seems to be fine :-)

Sorry I couldn't be of more help Ron. Sean beat me to the advice I was going to give, anyway. Glad to see it all worked out.

Come on, come on, get to the part where you fuck your computer!!! jeez

wooHAA!!

i fux0red my computer tonight worse than ever before, it was super exciting! (hi jen!)

it was like i didn't even have a BIOS anymore, when you turned it on, it would just do nothing. couldn't even go into the bios setup.

i am such a fucking idiot. while i was sitting there goofing around with all the settings i actually said out loud "i shouldn't be doing this"

Oh no! Something similar happens with my Mac sometimes, when I boot it up and get the question mark-on-disk icon that means it can't even find the operating system. But that's because my hard drive is on the way out. Yay for boot disks. And copious backups.

I hate the Mac question-mark icon because it's like your computer is as baffled as you are. It's the computer, it's terribly rude to sit there asking me how it's supposed to work.

Jen. Try disk Warrior, before you ditch that HD. I had the same recurring problem and it has been fixed by said programme.

i do need to make a bios-flashing floppy. i have the right files on cd, but after my trials and tribulations last night, i see that cd is a ways down the line in terms of boot order. last night i couldn't boot floppys even, really there was nothing to be done except tinker inside the case. eventually what saved me is there are some leads that when shorted out reset the bios modifications or something like that. anyways i've had my fun for now, but rest assured that in like a month i'll be fux0ring my computer again :-)

right on schedule, i fux0red my computer again last night. i am preparing it to dual boot with a linux installation and botched the partitioning so i couldn't boot except if i used a floppy. (luckily i made one since last time!) after a few hours of trying to fix the damn thing, i just gave up and decided to start from scratch.

so i just reformatted the disk and have a brand new clean xp install to work with, i think it will be good in the end because the old registry was cluttered with tons of crap from a jillion programs that i tried out over the past year.

i've fuxored my computer. PLEASE PLEASE try and help. if the paragraph below looks too BORING, then you can SKIP IT and just go to the shorter bit BELOW. especially if you are running WINDOWS 2000 PROFESSIONAL.

you see, i've got persistent spyware problems (should have reformatted ages ago but was too lazy) - one of the things that this awful malicious stuff does is to name the evil memory-eating programs that run in the background after windows system files. now the last time i started up my pc it was going REALLY slow, so i looked at the task manager thing and saw it was running "userinit.exe", which i didnt normally see. so i did i search for it in safe mode, i found it, it didn't seem to be in a system directory, so i figured it was a spyware clone thing and i'd delete it (and forgot that in safe mode things dont go into the recycle bin). now windows just hangs at the login part FOREVER. i guess it was the real userinit.exe, not the copy.

unless you know some other way to help me (or know that this isn't going to work), then maybe one of you nice people that's also running windows 2000 professional could make a copy of the file called "userinit.exe" and mail it to me at mitchnet70 at hotmail dot com ??? i'd sleep a lot better tonight if you would! TREMENDOUS THANKS IN ADVANCE!!!

maybe it doesnt have to be windows 2000 professional, maybe it can just be windows 2000.

help! (sorry if i bump this thread more times than is decent, i'm need to get this thing running pretty soon if possible)

i would help but unfortunately i am a computer retard and have also fuxored my computer. i just updated my windows xp professional due to harrassing notices about downloading the update, and it seems to have totally mangled the resolution on my monitor. is this possible?? suddenly all of the photos are screwy and the text is giant. anyone know what to do? it could have something to do with the fact that my monitor is from the bronze age, but surely i can remedy teh situation without getting a new one, right?

no doubt you've tried it, but does altering the resolution in the display settings change nothing?

how would one go about doing that? where will i find the display settings?

Right-click anywhere on the desktop that's blank and select "properties". Then select the "settings" tab on the far right, and then change the size of the screen with the slider bar on the left-hand side. You should also change your colour depth to 24 or 32-bit.

If that doesn't fix it up, it's possible that the Service Pack 2 installation may have fuxored your graphic card driver, so if you know what graphics card you have, you can download it. If it's a reasonably new machine, it should be as simple as knowing whether you have an ATI or an NVIDIA card, and then going and downloading the newest "unified" driver.

i have no 'settings' tab!

did you select properties first? that is weird

yes. there is only one tab/page option-'general'.

wait-i wasn't on desktop. i will try now.

Hm, you may have inadvertently right-clicked on something else that has a different properties dialogue... you can also get to the right place by going:

Start -> Control Panel -> Display -> settings tab

Btw mitch, check your email.

You should be able to find a dupe of the file in c:\WINNT\i386 too, as well as c:\WINNT\System32, by the way.

thank you so much Sean!!! except friggin hotmail "has permanently blocked the following potentially unsafe attachment(s): USERINIT.EXE (0.02 MB)". if you've got the time and are still reading, any chance of resending the mail to my gmail address (getmitchquick at gmail dot com)? hotmail wont even let me forward it. thank you again, whatever the case.