screwed up boot

[Kim Aku]

I was having trouble installing and using some old hardware
on a dual boot computer with Win2K and WinXP on two
separate NTFS partitions. As I knew it would work OK with
Win98, I used Partition Magic 5 from a floppy (because it
doesn't know about Win2K), and created a fat partition just
big enough for the job, which I made active and installed
Win 98. So far so good.

But when I tried to be clever and install Boot Magic, I
couldn't boot either of the NTFS partitions. W2K says it
<Windir>\system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupted, and XP
starts to boot and then halts the system with a fatal
error.

Eventually I found that if I use the PM floppy to unhide
the XP partition that BM hides I can boot either of the
NTFS systems normally, but then I need the floppy version
of PM to make the FAT W98 bootable - all a bit clumsy.

Any ideas?

 

[kim aku]

further to my message above, I hadn't checked the Win2K
boot (assuming it would be OK if I could boot to XP), but
Win2K still can't find hal.dll... damn.