Missing or corrupt Hal.dll file

[oldskool1964]

Thanks for reminding me about spywareblaster, I do have it installed on this machine but years out of date. It's quite possible I got too complacent with the xp machine. As per my posting history on this site I 1st registered 10 years ago after destroying a 4 gig HDD, I learned a lot about security after spending close to £100 on a 40 gig hdd, for an ME OS. Since then I just got so used to the xp machine, any problem just open task manager, the only real killer was system.exe kicking in randomly. Now I'm starting again with the old vista so a recommendation for a free firewall would be nice

[SpywareDr]

PCMag.com > Firewall Reviews

[oldskool1964]

Well I managed to get hold of an external hard disk enclosure and managed to recover data from the secondary (Maxtor) harddrive but no luck with the main harddrive. It recognises the recovery partition which has a folder called system restore where I guess all files are hidden. The only option for the main partition is to format before I can use it, which is useless to me I tried it on both this desktop and my laptop, on the laptop it did go one step further and gave me a 'cyclic redundancy error'. The drive did give some horrible clicking sounds along the way so I'm guessing it's now hopeless? I'm hoping not but...

Thanks for the link btw Dr. I've spent the last few days trying to get my laptop up to speed and now that's giving me headaches. A new thread in the rightful place will be on it's way if I can't find a fix.

[Midknyte]

Both the WD and Maxtor drives failed the diagnostics, so they are both bad. Don't try to reuse them.