No power off in XP and Hal.dll problem

I

Ian Hodgson

New Member
WinXP can no longer power the computer off. Saying "Your computer can now be shut down" As if it was not ACPI compliant. I checked the device mgr/computer and Std PC is enabled and ACPI drivers are not installed. I run two versions of "WInXP Home" one on C: and the other D: C: was installed about a week ago and I noticed that the hal.dll files are different in each system32 folder.

Bothe file version of hal.dll are the same=5.1.2600.2180 but the one one C: is 128 Kb and created on 8/5/2004 and the other one on D: is 103 Kb and created on 6/23/2007. This is weird because C: XP was installed a week ago????

Are these two issues related? i.e. is the power-off/ACPI issue related to the hal.dll issue. How can I fix my power-off problem. Is the hal.dll difference a problem?
Thanks for any help and suggestions.
 
I found a solution to this problem. It was a matter of having a hal.dll which was created on the same machine in a newly installed OS (sameWinXP Home). Then copying the new hal.dll across to replace the offending hal.dll. Now my computer is ACPI compliant again and power's off properly. In my case this was easy as I had a dual boot of the same OS. If you didn'y have a dual boot you could create a temporary one in a different partition, then delete it. Should work.
 
I multiboot XP Pro as well as Vista along with an XP Home primary and never run into the hal.dll problem. The 2004 copy was obviously the prior version before SP2 was out in november of 2004.
 
Yes, You are right. But why did that work? Both OS's have SP2 installed. I would like to install Vista but I'll wait untill I have a new SATA drive installed. Now what will happen when I remove one of these two drives? Will the boot.ini cause a problem and will Hal.dll become corrupt?
 
You first have to know which drive is going to be removed? If you have a ide primary and a second with the default boot.ini on the primary drive as seen on most systems you would remove the second drive's listing from that when pulling the second drive. This would be the case for two sata drives as well where the default boot.ini and mbr are actually located.

Which drive is default and first in the bios boot order? Windows there(XP of course) may still need the trip to the recovery console for the Fixmbr and Fixboot commands once the other drive was removed. When Vista is installed to a new drive aded later the installer will go for the host drive and create a new boot folder along with putting it's own boot loader and mbr there. It then will make itself the default OS even while being on a different drive.
 
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