"HAL.DLL missing or corrupted" stymies dual boot

[Guest]

The on-switch on my notebook died, and while the company fixed that, they
also blew away the contents of my HD and gave me a new copy of XP Pro Tablet
Edition.
Well, I had imaged the old copy which had all my apps, and so I
repartitioned with Partition Magic and impressed the OS and Apps images onto
the HD.
The dual boot worked just once. It started with the new XP, then booted
from the partition with my old XP. All apps worked. Looking with DISKPART,
Volume 1 with the new XP was marked "system", Vol 2 with the old XP was
"boot". Then I made the mistake of making Vol.1 active with diskpart. On
rebooting, I got the above message about HAL.DLL missing or corrupted (it's
there). I used the emergency diskette to make Vol.2 active again, and now
diskpart says vol2 is "system" and vol1 is "boot", and I cannot boot vol2
which has all my apps. What to do? (System Restore is turned off on both
partitions because I had imaged them, but now Ghost or Disk Image dont work.
They show but one partition, the whole HD, though fdisk and PQmagic show all
partitions as they actually are.)

 

[Uncle John]

Bodo
When the HAL DLL (HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer) missing message appears
in your type of configuration you have got corrupted or missing boot files.
You could try the following

Insert and boot from your Windows XP CD. At the first R=Repair option, press
the R key at the command prompt type in sfc /scannow and let it replace any
dll's that are missing.

Let us know if you are OK because there are other longer solutions.

 

[Will Denny]

Hi

Please try the following link to Kelly's web site:

"HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer"
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_h.htm

--


Will Denny
MS MVP Windows Shell/User
Please reply to the News Groups

 

[Guest]

Well, unfortunately I can't do that. Acer did not give me a WinXP CD.
There must be another problem anyway, because I got the same error
message when (before Acer put this new XP on my laptop) I created another
primary partition and impressed a known good Win98SE image. No doubt it had
all boot files; I restored it on the desktop where it came from and it worked
fine.
I would have restored the saved image, but as I said, both Ghost and
DiskImage no longer see any partitons though Fdisk and Partition Magic do.

 

[Uncle John]

Bodo

Could you post the text of your boot.ini files from each partition so that
we can see how your boot is operating Do NOT send them as an attachment.

 

[Guest]

Here's the boot.ini of the partition that actually starts up (not the one
that I want to start that does the actual boot and then switches to the
other):

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=C:\
[operating systems]
tition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC
Edition" /fastdetect

Yes, it says "tition" instead of "partition". When I saw this, I corrected
it to "partition", but that did not resolve the problem.

The other partition, the one I want to start up and which seems to do the
actual booting, is no longer visible to Windows (only fdisk sees it), so I
cannot post its boot.ini here. However, on boot, it offers 2 (not 1)
instances of "Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition", and when I choose the
second, it says "cannot boot to this partition" plus some other general
advice, but no specific error.