alright, I'll go ahead and let everyone know that I'm not much of a computer guy, but I know enough to get by, so if this is a stupid question then I apologize, but it is on a subject beyond my knowledge.

I have an old Gateway purchased back in 2001 or 2002 and I am running Windows XP Home on it. About a month ago I bought some used RAM from someone in classifieds because my computer has been running really slow. Well, a couple days ago I went to restart my computer and received a message saying that my computer couldnt start-up because or a missing or corrupt file. the file was a windows root hal file. I read around online and it says that this file could be missing because I either have a virus on my computer or because some P2P software (I have Limewire that I use occasionally) I use could mess something up causing this hal file to be removed.

I've had this computer for a long time and it has never given me any problems in the past, I'm wondering if there could be a correlation between the new RAM I installed and my computer crashing. thanks to anyone who could help me out with this.

3/15/2006 2:55:42 PM

^could be, i would guess HD though. see you can get a hard drive checker and throw that on a CD to boot too. easy to check out. also, take the ram out for good measure.

3/15/2006 2:59:49 PM

http://www.memtest.org/

Boot the PC with a floppy or CD with the tools from this site and you can know for sure. (Memtest86+ is pretty much the best memory diagnostic app available.)

3/15/2006 3:09:28 PM

Reinstall Windows. Your HAL is the hardware abstraction layer file and can get screwed up by changes in hardware ... either you update it manually (pain in butt) or reinstall Windows and it will update it for you.

[Edited on March 15, 2006 at 4:12 PM. Reason : .]

3/15/2006 4:12:00 PM

^but will that mean that I have to delete all my files and reformat? I would like to do that only as a last resort.

3/17/2006 11:14:18 AM

^If you're FORCED to reformat, you may be able to save your junk, and here's how...

If you have 2 CD drives (one of which is a writer), then you can use a live version of linux (runs off the CD, not the hard drive), and then use your other drive to burn your files off while the linux CD is in the first drive.

If you only have ONE drive but at least, I dunno, maybe 256MB of ram, you can use Damn Small Linux, which has the option to run out of your computer's RAM. So, you pop the CD in, type in:

dsl toram

and hit enter, and the linux CD is decompressed and copied to the RAM. Now, you can remove the CD and keep Linux running (sweet!). For this case, if you don't know much about unix commands, then you're going to probably need help in mounting the hard drive so that you can copy the contents to a CD.

Or, you can try using CPX mini linux
http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~bading/cpx-mini/
which mounts all the drives for you, but you'll need either two drives so that you can leave this CD in, or about half a gig of RAM for a ram-mount.

At any rate, this is always my backup plan if something REALLY goes wrong, and I have used such methods to salvage files before. There might be an easier way for someone who doesn't know linux well, but it's relatively easy if you know what you're doing.

These linux distros can read NTFS drives, but cannot write NTFS, so you cannot use them to try to fix the files on your computer, only to access them.

3/18/2006 3:51:08 AM

haha!

[Edited on March 19, 2006 at 12:03 AM. Reason : .]

3/18/2006 11:54:39 PM