Help with HAL.dll w/o re-install?

[Dersu76]

Hi: New to the board and am looking for a little help.

Here's the problem:

A couple of month's a ago I saved my pennies and built a fancy new computer. I also used Nlite for the first time to create an XPPRO unattended install disc mainly so I could to put My Documents and Settings on a seperate HDD from the OS/root. Seemed like a good idea at the time...

Turns out I chose the wrong ACPI and I'm running an E6850 at half speed; only one core shows up on Windows Task Manager (yes I checked the one CPU per graph option under the view menu). On device manager I see two processors, at startup two processors, Asus P5k-E wifi/ap mobo; as far as I can tell no way to accidentally disable a core in the bios (though not 100% certain). CPU-Z tells me I've only one core. The final nail in the coffin is checking my hal.dll--original file name under properties is halacpi.dll; NOT halmacpi.dll which is what I guess it should've been.

How I missed this for three months? I'm an id***. er, ah noob.

So, two questions:

1) How can I easily fix this? (hopefully without too much more work; I've read a lot so far and gotten nowhere). I did try running HALu.exe (a hal updater someone wrote for just this task, but it did nothing...) I did not check repair as an option on my Nlite install.

2) If I reinstall my OS on the root drive via Nlite how do I retain or easily replace the data currently on my seperate data HDD? I do have backups. This is of course the last option as I don't feel like I can spend time making/testing a new nlite disk, installing, install all our app's again (Ugh!), migrating data...blah blah blah.

Oh yeah this needs to be quick and painless as my GF with bombard me with grief if I spend too many nights up until 2pm with the 'puter. If this turns ugly she my do something drastic....like buy a mac.

[IcemanND]

Try this:

In the device manager open Computer

right click on the Standard PC, ACPI PC or whatever is listed.

select properties

Slect the driver tab

click update driver

select 'no not this time' click next

select install from a list.... click next

select don't search... click next

select ACPI Multiprocessor PC click next

if it is not listed, get out your original cd, you will need to expand the hal.inf from the i386 folder to your computer and click have disk. then select the above.

continue on as if installing any other hardware device and reboot.

[Dersu76]

Thanks for the quick response IcemanND. I tried your suggestion and was confronted with this error: "The specified location does not contain information about your hardware". The hal.in_ was expanded from a slipstreamed xp pro sp2 disk to hal.inf, but not from nlite version I originally installed with (though I don't think this matters).

In my extensive searchings on this--but limited comprehension--does something like this sound like it might work?

http://www.leinss.com/twohals.htm

How to actually switch HALs:

Extract the proper HAL along with the right OS Kernel and rename the extracted files as follows:

expand D:\I386\HALMACPI.DL_ C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\HAL.DLL

expand D:\I386\NTKRNLMP.EX_ C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\NTOSKRNL.EXE

where D: is the drive letter used by your CD-ROM drive and C: is where your WINNT folder resides. You need to be sure to copy the right Kernel and HAL file based on your needs. The example above shows how you could switch to a MultiProc ACPI HAL from a single proc non-ACPI.

Another website described the same, but added another file to expand (which I incidentally was unable to find on my CD or machine). Here is the description:

http://blog.case.edu/djc6/2005/09/22/imagi...t_hals_wsysprep

The three files are (regardless of original files folder) :

expand HALMACPI.DL_ C:\Windows\System32\HAL.DLL

expand NTKRNLMP.EX_ C:\Windows\System32\NTOSKRNL.EXE

expand NTKRPAMP.EX_ C:\Windows\System32\NTKRNLPA.EXE

Thanks again for the help and sorry if I threw too much out there at one time. Hopefully IcemanND or someone else will have futher guidance to move on....

[IcemanND]

Looks like that should work too. That is basically the manual procedure of what I listed above.

[Dersu76]

That's what I sort of thought. Will Safe Mode ensure that if something goes afoul I'll be able to rollback somehow? Because of Nlite I don't have repair as an option and don't have the time to reinstall right now.

So, don't feel bad if I don't write back a quick reply on my success as I may not get to it until the weekend or next.

I will expand these three referenced files from sp2.cab and replace them via cmd prompt and cross my fingers.

Thank you tons for stepping in and helping out!

[IcemanND]

maybe. I'd make a bartpe cd, or ubcd before proceeding. You should be able to do a repair from your standard sp2 cd if required.

[Dersu76]

well, i took the plunge last night and...drowned. sorry to say the manual method didn't work. i may have to resign to a reinstall i guess. fortunately i made an incremental acronis backup the day before of my system drive. i monkeyed around for a bit and made a bigger mess than i started with trying to use bartpe and ubcd..oh well. live and learn

thanks again for your help. let me know if you--or anyone else out there has a solution.

[Dersu76]

Wow. I'm sure this post is way down there now, but I just had a breakthrough on this problem. Just as I was prepared to reinstall OS from a newly minted Nlite cd (after spending my evening making all my backups current and downloading all updated software to install when complete) I thought I would give it a shot one more time. Amazingly it worked! No reinstall for me--at least until Gold SP3 is out and tested.

Here are the simple details: (though I am uncertain what was exactly different from my previous failed attempt.) as a recap I initially had install via Nlite as ACPI, not as a multiprocessor.

from the new--properly configured multiprocessor Nlite CD I did the following from command line in XP (left CD in during reboots--dont know if this did anything)

expand HALMACPI.DL_ C:\Windows\System32\HAL.DLL AND

expand NTKRNLMP.EX_ C:\Windows\System32\NTOSKRNL.EXE

I rebooted once and it proceeded to reboot a couple of times to just past bios--stopping on black screen and then rebooting on it's own. after a couple of sighs I rebooted again and it flashed up a screen full my boot files configuration and drivers across the whole screen and seemingly hung. then asked if I wanted to boot to safe mode; which i did. once up and running in SM it automatically found and installed new hardware for ACPI multiprocessor. i was pretty excited at this point as you might imagine! after a reboot out of safe mode it came right up to login. Now things are running as they should (two side by side CPU's in the windows task manager--not to mention much faster photoshop and multitasking). One other thing which may have helped was just prior to this I again looked into trying to enable my bios to use two processors--the only setting I changed was to enable acpi 2.0. I have an Asus P5k-E wifi with american megatrends bios (0906 i think). This may have helped, but am uncertain...

Thanks for the help IcemanND.