The Windows operating system uses HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) for the Windows NT series of operating systems. This hal.dll file is actually a layer of software products that directly interacts with the system hardware. Because of this, different applications and device drives do not need to deal directly with the hardware and must make calls to HAL routines to determine hardware specific information, thereby making your job much easier. However, at times this file gets corrupt due to which you cannot start your computer as the system is unable to detect the active partition. There are several methods that should be tried out to bring the system in order. If these methods do not work, then you should use a third-party Windows partition recovery software to recover the inaccessible data.

Such a problem can occur when you try to start your Windows XP system. You may face the following error message in this case:...

The MFT (Master File Table) is a repository in the NTFS file system that keeps the record of all the file data including file name, creation date, access permissions, and contents, etc. To view any type of information related to the files, you can refer to the MFT. However, at times the MFT itself gets corrupt due to too many files. Because of this, you may not be able to even start your system. You can use the 'Bcupdate.exe' utility to get rid of this problem. If that tool is unable to recover partition data, then you should use a third-party partition recovery software to overcome this situation.

Let us consider a situation in which you are using Windows XP and are unable to start it after the boot process gets over. In this case, the following error is displayed:

“NTLDR is missing Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart.”

Cause:...