Today when I tried booting up my windows machine i got a message that the file hal.dll was missing or damaged (virus?). Anyway, I thought I'd use knoppix and a cd-rw to copy a new hal.dll from another windows comp. The problem is I can't get read/write permissions for the windows partition under knoppix. I tried right-clicking on the desktop icon, chose permissions and changed them all to read/write, but it still says the file system is read-only. I also tried "mount -t ntfs /dev/dha1 /mnt/hda -n -o rw", but the same thing happens there. And I can't change /etc/fstab since knoppix runs from a cd.

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#3.2

Writing to NTFS is not well supported in Linux - it's not just a Knoppix issue

Ok, judging from that text, messing with NTFS from linux is not really a good idea, right? I tried using the Windows cd to copy the dll, but it gives me an error message when trying to overwrite the old dll. I'm beginning to think there's something wrong with the hard drive. Any suggestions? (i know this isn't really a linux question anymore)

[EDIT] NM, I found out this is a common windows problem.

The hal.dll error message is often caused by (1) the windows partition being hidden, (2) the windows partition not being flagged as bootable/active or (3) a change in the BIOS level hard drive boot order, which can include copying the windows partition to another drive with dd or PartitionMagic. It may be caused by changes in partition numbering after moving or deleting partitions.

I have personally run into this error message a number of times and it was never caused by true damage to hal.dll. My take on the error message is that the NT loader process cannot find hal.dll due to one of the causes listed above.