RE: Windows 2000 HAL's

From: Jupp, Peter (JuppPat_private)
Date: Mon Jul 16 2001 - 10:37:44 PDT

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    Hi Craig,
    
    I've experienced nothing but grief in numerous attempts at changing the Win2k HAL. It started with a motherboard that was supposed to be ACPI compliant, but not recognized by Win2k's install, therefore a non ACPI HAL was loaded by default. 
    There's a fair amount of information on this in the MS Knowledge base, but not much of it was very useful. Win2k is extremely hardware-specific. I've had problems with the HAL after just swapping cards around. For this reason, I don't find it to be a very versatile or useful forensics platform. 
    
    Have you tried rebooting the machine from a Win2k CD and 'repairing' the install? I've had limited success with this. 
    
    Good Luck,
    
    Det. Peter Jupp
    Ottawa Police Service
    High Tech Crime Unit
    (613)236-1222 ext 2334
    jupppat_private
    
    
    -----Original Message-----
    From: Craig Earnshaw [mailto:Craig.Earnshawat_private]
    Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2001 1:35 PM
    To: Forensicsat_private
    Subject: Windows 2000 HAL's
    
    
    Does anyone have any experience of changing the Hardware Abstraction
    Layer (HAL) on a Windows 2000 machine?
    
    I recently imaged a W2K machine (with SafeBack) and now need to boot it
    in order to get one of the apps installed on the machine up and
    running.  The problem that I'm facing is that the HAL that is installed
    on that restored drive will not interact with any of my workstations in
    the lab.  Unfortunately I can't just copy the file relating to the app
    onto a different drive and run it that way due to config and dll details
    etc.  Also, I can't get an uninstalled version of the app as it was
    custom written for the company to whom the machine belonged (and they're
    on the other side to my case!).
    
    When I've come across this before I've been able to get around it by
    installing the imaged drive in the original machine, however, in this
    case, I don't have any access to the original machine.
    
    Any thoughts/comments etc would be most helpful as I've got a fairly
    tight deadline on this one.
    
    Thanks
    
    Craig
    
    
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