Great article - Windows XP little known "rebuild" command could save you HOURS of reinstall woes and tribulations...
1) XP's Little-known "Rebuild" Command
Have you ever run into a "Missing HAL.DLL," "Invalid Boot.Ini," or "Windows could not start..." message?
It usually takes a lot to stop XP in its tracks. But sometimes, especially after major hardware failures or part swaps (e.g. moving the OS to a new hard drive), or after problems with dual- or multi-booting software, you may encounter seemingly-intractable errors such as those.
These problems can seem hard to get past. For example, the first time I got a "Cannot Find \Windows\System32\hal.dll" error message, I went looking and saw that the HAL.DLL was right where it was supposed to be. It wasn't missing at all. Why couldn't the OS find it?
I even tried copying a fresh version of the file to \Windows\System32, in case the original file was corrupted in some way. But that didn't help and the OS still would not boot.
That was when I learned about XP's built-in "Rebuild" command. It often can easily fix "missing HAL," "Invalid Boot.Ini," "Windows could not start..." and similar problems in just a minute or two.
I'm mentioning this now because of our recent coverage of disk swaps and other activities; which have caused a number of your fellow readers to run into exactly this kind of trouble.
But even if you've escaped problems like this so far, it's worth knowing about because you can potentially save yourself hours and hours of manual reinstall/rebuilding of a failed OS if you ever *do* encounter this problem in the future.
A full "rebuild" command how-to, including the full method and shortcut versions, is now posted, free, at:
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=185301251
1) XP's Little-known "Rebuild" Command
Have you ever run into a "Missing HAL.DLL," "Invalid Boot.Ini," or "Windows could not start..." message?
It usually takes a lot to stop XP in its tracks. But sometimes, especially after major hardware failures or part swaps (e.g. moving the OS to a new hard drive), or after problems with dual- or multi-booting software, you may encounter seemingly-intractable errors such as those.
These problems can seem hard to get past. For example, the first time I got a "Cannot Find \Windows\System32\hal.dll" error message, I went looking and saw that the HAL.DLL was right where it was supposed to be. It wasn't missing at all. Why couldn't the OS find it?
I even tried copying a fresh version of the file to \Windows\System32, in case the original file was corrupted in some way. But that didn't help and the OS still would not boot.
That was when I learned about XP's built-in "Rebuild" command. It often can easily fix "missing HAL," "Invalid Boot.Ini," "Windows could not start..." and similar problems in just a minute or two.
I'm mentioning this now because of our recent coverage of disk swaps and other activities; which have caused a number of your fellow readers to run into exactly this kind of trouble.
But even if you've escaped problems like this so far, it's worth knowing about because you can potentially save yourself hours and hours of manual reinstall/rebuilding of a failed OS if you ever *do* encounter this problem in the future.
A full "rebuild" command how-to, including the full method and shortcut versions, is now posted, free, at:
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=185301251
