I cloned my main drive (250Gb) to a 2nd internal drive (320Gb). The 2nd internal has 2 partitions: 237Gb and 60.5Gb. I chose the 237Gb partition as destination for the cloning, of course I set it as Primary, Active to make it bootable.So when I try to boot my system with the cloned disk as main drive the PC even before the Windows logo starts stops with the following message:
WINDOWS COULD NOT START BECAUSE THE FILE HAL.DLL IN WINDOWS/SYSTEM32 IS MISSING OR CORRUPT. REINSTALL THIS FILE TO START WINDOWS
I checked the Win32 folder in the cloned disk and the hal.dll file is there.
Can anyone suggest a fix or explain what's happenning?
Thanks
(I used Ghost10 to clone the disk) 

HAL.DLL won't work from one system to the next, unless the motherboard, chipset, processor, bios etc are the same. If the system you cloned to doesn't have, well, exactly the same hardware as the old one, it probably won't boot. Repairing windows might do the trick.

I hate that file, it is horrible, if its missing your entire windows stops working.  I spent 12+ hours trying to fix my computers HAL.DLL error once...I then said i've spent too much time on it and ill just reinstall.  Its better to just give up and start new, or use your other drive.

As for HAL.DLL, Microsoft or someone else should really create a User Friendly Startup Disk for XP that fixes those errors that can cripple a system.

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Originally posted by Dane
As for HAL.DLL, Microsoft or someone else should really create a User Friendly Startup Disk for XP that fixes those errors that can cripple a system.

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Shawn, I installed the cloned disk in the SAME identical PC I was using the source disk, so the mobo, chipset, cards, etc are all IDENTICAL, except of course the hard drive which is a different one. I've cloned hard drives before and they all were succesfull, this time only I encountered this problem. Before the cloning was done on destination hard drives with only one partition (and this time the HD has 2 partitions as said above). I also did not check the option to copy the Master Boot Record, because I thought it might delete the partitions. Does this make any difference? Also, what's the procedure to repair the HAL.DLL file using the Microsoft recovery console?

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Originally posted by alegator
I also did not check the option to copy the Master Boot Record, because I thought it might delete the partitions. Does this make any difference?

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By cloning I mean a bit by bit clone of the HDD, and to do so I used Norton Ghost 10.
Regarding copying the Master Boot Record, I did not include this option as I'm afraid it might delete the partitions in the destination disk. One partition has data files in it which I want to keep, and the other partition I created it for the purpose of clining the source disk.

Then I hope you ticked the correct options and all because a bit by bit copy isn't going to work when your partitions are slightly different (eg: clustersize, sector size, etc, and all that stuff).

And the obvious, but I'm sure you knew this already: make sure the drive letter is the same as before, or nothing (not much) will work either as Windows wouldn't be able to locate files.

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Originally posted by Dane
I hate that file, it is horrible

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