I recently got a pretty sweet tablet laptop from my father. It had a bunch of Novell network stuff installed so that it could be part of a larger network. I didn't need it and it was somewhat annoying, so I started removing it (unfortunately it wasn't all listed under Novell, so it took a couple of tries). Upon removing the last of the components, Windows started to complain on restart about a missing .dll and wouldn't give me the option to log in so that I could go about fixing it.

I am unsure whether I told it to delete common files or what. I don't recall doing it, but I was in something of a hurry at that moment (poor performance due to poor planning and preparation). Nonetheless, I currently had a semi-functional computer.

So I decided to try to boot into the recovery partition or at least use the OS install disks to get to the recovery console.

The laptop is a Gateway and apparently did not have a recovery partition. The _OEM_ OS installer disk did not give me the option to start the recovery console, it just gave me the option to reinstall Windows using either a "Backup user data and install" and a "Destructive Install". I love the terminology used in these things.

Since I didn't have any other option and wasn't thinking clearly, I decided to backup and install.

On restart, I got the fun message that "the following dll was missing or corrupt: hal.dll, press any key to restart".

A little reading on the internet (I do have a desktop thank goodness)suggested that this particular message is a lie and that what it really means is that either the "master boot record" is corrupt or that "boot.ini" is corrupt.

I spent a good part of the net couple of days trying to come up with a way of saving the laptop. Since the disks were OEM installers, they didn't have the recovery console built into them. Windows XP, since it is supposed to have the recovery console built into the installer, doesn't really have an option for a bootable disk for repair, unless you have a "master boot record" preferably for the installation that you are trying to recover.

Of course this general problem was compounded by the fact that Windows XP Tablet Edition is apparently different enough from a regular installation of XP that the two versions of the same operating system don't play well together.

Thinking that a corrupt mbr might be the problem, I decided that a "destructive" installation might be the key. Format the hard drive, re-reinstall windows and it'll all be good, right?

No. On reboot, hal is still reportedly missing. Arrrrgh!

I went through this a couple of times, reinstall, reboot, start again. I borrowed someone's xp install disk - just in case. No love. Apparently the non OEM installer didn't recognize my hard drive. It just kept getting scarier.

Then it occurred to me. Bill had told me about Knoppix a couple of years ago when I killed my first installation of fedora on my old laptop. If Knoppix could fix that mess, maybe it could mount an NTFS drive and let me poke around.

After downloading and burning Knoppix to cd, I started the laptop. It worked like a dream, booted straight into KDE and mounted the hd like a porn star. Now at least I could look around. I hunted down "parted" (listed as QTparted in this distro) and took a look at the disk. Hmmm. One 4 gig partition listed as "unknown" file format and one considerably larger partition in NTFS format. Was this my problem?

I debated internally for a short while before deciding that deleting the partition that was incomprehensible to parted probably wouldn't make matters worse.

Done, logout, reinstall Windows (just to be sure), boot smoothly into Windows desktop. Brief relief before beginning the process of reinstalling driver and programs. Luckily, due to the wonders of cloud computing, I lost relatively little personal data that could not be replaced.

So, for all of you who own computers from producers like Dell, Gateway, HP, etc I suggest that you:

1) make sure that recovery console is installed on your computer as described here
2) do backup. I was lucky, but if it's on your internal hard drive and you really, really don't want to lose it then you should back it up by putting it on some kind of removable media. Burning it to cd/dvd works.
3) Download and burn to cd Knoppix 5.1.1 (currently the most recent stable release I could find). Put that somewhere safe.
4) When you run into a problem where you cannot boot into windows or need to recover data from a non-functional windows box, call on one of the many helpful people here to walk you through recovering it with Knoppix. If you so choose, you can read through the online documentation and fix it yourself (it is instructive) plenty of other people have probably had a problem similar to yours.
5) Be sure to buy some beer/wine/beverage of choice for your favorite geek in thanks for averting disaster.

I am not computer geek, but I've spent plenty of time annoying them with questions and pestering them for advice. I am sure that there will be plenty of comments and corrections and, just to forestall the Inevitable (I will not be able to hear that word without thinking of Nat now), I am well aware that many of my computer problems exist between the keyboard and chair. But I just want to say:

Thanks Knoppix! (and thanks Bill for introducing me to Knoppix)

Good luck,
j