Hal.dll

Hello,

Wondering if someone can give me some advice.
Did a dual boot with Suse 10.0 and XP, and somehow I must have damaged my boot.ini. Attempted to do a repair using the XP installation disk. Bad idea - now I have two versions of XP running on the same partition. The first one on the OS menu boots up just fine, and allows me to access all of my data from the old install, however when trying to boot up the second one I get the error message: Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <windows root>/system32.hal.dll

Now when I try to use the recovery console it only shows me one install...and its not the broken one. So when I use Bootcfg /scan it only shows one instance of windows. Proved this by doing a expand d:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll and it overwrote all my video drivers in the 'new' install of windows.

My question is, how can I make my original installation bootable, I really dont want to have to do a reformat.

Thanks,

Dexter

 

Hmmm...this may nto be what your after, but this link contains instructions for removing the erroneous option in your boot option menu.

 

Thanks for the quick reply, but no, it appears that both installs are legitimate, and I am trying to fix the 'broken' one. I think I know how to get rid of the 'new' install after I get the old one running.

Thanks again,

Dexter

 

I'd expect that you don't really have a 'broken' installation, but only this erroneous entry, hence why you would only see one in recovery console, and bootcfg /scan.

 

If you actually had two installations, the new one wouldnt be able to access the files from the old one - I've been there, it's not fun.

 

Okay Fred Langa has a discussion on rebuilding HAL.DLL recently:

http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2006/2006-04-17.htm

Read the first article. Here is an excellent article he has on for adding power to "Recovery Console" also worth having a look at:

http://www.informationweek.com/LP/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187000225&pgno=1&queryText=

Worth doing this tweak for the next time you need to use the recovery console. Hope this helps.