hal.dll deleted; can't boot into windows

[Wowowlop1]

A friend of mine turned on his computer like any other day, after nothing had altered in the hardware, and it failed to boot, returning a hal.dll missing error. Me and a third party tried to assist him in troubleshooting it the entire day, but to no avail. One thing we tried was using a windows 10 recovery USB, but it said that the hard drive was locked. I don't have the computer here with me to troubleshoot, but I'd like to have some solutions to try tomorrow when he's working on it again. Our current solution is to see if we can boot onto a live USB or other storage media and retrieve the lost files, but in case it doesn't work I want to post here and see what people think. We don't want to have to lose the files, as a few important documents are stored there.

Thanks for any and all replies.

 

[Erwin06]

Download an windows 10 iso..boot from it create a new partition..install it there and there you have! make sure you have your seriel number from win10

(win10 iso..setup will guide you..it is from microsoft) https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10

 

[Colif]

I would download ISO as stated above but try to run start up repair once you boot from it, as it may fix your booting problem without needing a new partition being created. This video shows how to do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFR75FPEdhI

You can run system restore from here too

Potential problem with the new partition approach is Win 10 may refuse to install on the drive once the partition is created as it depends on what format the disc was in on the previous install, and what type of BIOS you have. If PC is fairly new and has a UEFI Bios, but was updated from Win 7, then the install may not work unless you delete all the partitions on the drive, losing all the data. Specs of computer would remove my need to guess if it might happen or not.

 

[Wowowlop1]

At this point, the SSD is in a separate computer, and it appears in disk management but is RAW, and isn't detected by Recuva or by TestDisk.

 

[Colif]

This might help: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2602594/ssd-raw-disk.html

I am afraid you might have lost all that data you were trying to save. I would suggest in future to use cloud based back up or an external hdd or even just a 2nd ssd/hdd in case