Help! Dual Booting, Linux, hal.dll etc.

[R]

Hi!

I have recently installed Red Hat Linux 9.0 and am using
its bootloader GRUB. Unfortunately, Windows XP Home Edition
is now refusing to boot properly, and I am inclined to
blame boot.ini. A new partition had to be made (ext3
format) before the ntfs XP partition (C for the linux
boot loader. Anyway, the result is that Windows XP warns me
that hal.dll is corrupt or missing at startup. I have tried
to use the recovery console (from the Recovery CD) to
repair the faults etc. but it asks for a password (which
has never been set). I think this is as a result of the
password file being lost.
I have partition magic 8 and have used this to partition
the HD.

I want to:
a) preferably repair my current XP installation
b) otherwise reinstall windows XP
c) last resort: reformat my hard drive
(I really don't want to do this however)

However, when reinstalling windows XP, I want it to use
ONLY its old NTFS partition, NOT reformat the whole hard disk.
I have most of my documents (Which I had on a FAT32
partition) backed-up elsewhere but still would prefer to
keep a few things on my existing NTFS partition. I can't
access NTFS partitions from Linux (unlike FAT32) and so
need to have Windows XP working to access it.

My hard drive is partitioned as follows:

1) Boot partition for Linux (GRUB Loader) about 50MB
2) NTFS partition for XP about 30 GB (C:\)
3) Extended Partition
a) Logical Partition: FAT32 My Documents partition (F:\)
b) Logical Partition: NTFS Data Backup (G:\)
c) Logical Partition: ext3 Linux Partition (/)
d) Logical Partition: SWAP Linux Partition (/swap)

Any help, suggestions, etc.

Thanks,
P.S. Sorry for this being a long post!

 

[John]

HAd this same thing happen to me a while back. I deleted all the linux
partitions, and from the recovery console I ran fixmbr and i was ok. For the
password, try blank or admin or administartor. If you are still locked out,
I may be able to point you to a tool that will blank a pwd on 2k/XP.