Not the most serious problem, but maybe you guys know about it.

Three times in a row when restaring win10 Home, I got an error screen
that it couldnt' find hal.dll.

Except that every time, all I had to do was turn off the laptop and
restart and it started fine. I've never had this before. It's a
little scary but less so each time, of course.

Does this ring a bell with anyone?

Googling just gives examples of really having a missing or corrupt hal.

On 12/26/2023 10:55 AM, micky wrote:
> Not the most serious problem, but maybe you guys know about it.
>
> Three times in a row when restaring win10 Home, I got an error screen
> that it couldnt' find hal.dll.
>
> Except that every time, all I had to do was turn off the laptop and
> restart and it started fine. I've never had this before. It's a
> little scary but less so each time, of course.
>
> Does this ring a bell with anyone?
>
> Googling just gives examples of really having a missing or corrupt hal.
>

Hal.dll used to be of more usage, when OSes had more than
one hardware abstraction choice. Modern computers only
have one choice.

This picture of Device Manager, shows where this choice might live.

Naturally, the 32-bit OS would have the 32-bit version, the 64-bit OS would have
the 64-bit version, but from a practical point of view, to the user they are
the same thing.

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/k49gNDxM/ACPI-No-HAL-driver.gif

If a laptop was not ACPI compliant, it might produce a
poor quality ACPI table (maybe it is supposed to be ACPI Version 4
or so).

The OS, upon seeing this, might throw a hissy fit, and try to
find a working Hardware Abstraction Layer. Like it was back in
WinXP era. If the OS could actually succeed at this (it can't),
then it would say "it is safe to turn off this PC" at
an attempt to shutdown.

The OS definitely has a HAL.dll file in System32. That
is not the problem. But the message to me, indicates
"something smelly is coming from the BIOS". It does
not necessarily mean the file cannot be loaded.
Maybe it loads HAL.dll, discovers it has no alternative
functions, and then pretends you will be feeding
it yet another HAL version some day.

The error message could be coming from some WinXP era
code, but it got vectored there, by a modern-day
W10/W11 problem. The OS needs some "more defensive" code
to be written, to handle bad ACPI tables better.

I don't know if booting a Linux DVD on it, dmesg
would have any messages indicating the ACPI tables smell or not.
In Linux, if you enter "noacpi" on the kernel boot line,
you will get to see "it is safe to turn off this PC" at
shutdown. I actually got to see that, within the last
two months :-) I had to use the power switch, to shut off.

Paul