M
Mark G.
Please bare with me as I explain what I have done to this point so that
hopeful I can get a clear, concise answer that solves my issue immediately.
I appreciate your reading this and your patience and thoughtfulness in
answering it.
So I reloaded windows on my computer completely whipping out the old
install. No problems there and all went as planned. My computer setup
consists of the following:
SATA Raptor 72gig drive (primary SATA) - 2 partitions, 1 - 40gig (label C
and 1- 30gig (label D
SATA Maxtor 250gig drive (secondary SATA) (label F
IDE Maxtor 120gig drive (primary IDE) (label E
IDE Maxtor 40gig drive (secondary IDE) (label G
IDE ZIP 100 (label B
IDE CD/DVD-RW Drive (label H
Anyhow, I partition the Raptor drive because I like to have my OS on the
30gig partition along with things like my anti-virus software, winzip, etc..
while on the 40gig drive I generally put fast games like Half Life 2 or
Battlefiled 2.
Anyhow, I had to mess around to get windows in the initial installation of
XP Pro top recognize the Raptor SATA drive as being where I wanted drive C:
to be. I also had to allocate 8mb for some reason to another IDE drive and
in doing so, created an I: drive which merely consist of a boot.ini file, an
ntldr file, and a ntdetect.com file. So it is relatively small, but for some
reason, I did not see any way around this. After getting all installed, I
did not care for the drive letters assigned to certain drives so I therefore
used Partition Magic 8 to re-label the drives to the drive letters of my
choice. While doing this, I was careful as to not mess with any drive that
was a system or boot drive as I have had problems with that in the past.
Anyhow, all seemed fine, I patched everything with auto updates and
proceeded to move forward in setting things up. In that, I finally removed
my Windows XP CD to load other CD's of things I needed. Anyhow, when
rebooting, I get the famed ntldr is missing error. Fine, I simple go into
recovery console to correct. In doing so, I just copied both the ntldr and
the ntdetect.com files to the root of my C: drive. After rebooting again,
then I got some kind of boot.ini issue/error, but it still proceeded to boot
into windows just fine. And then finally, after that, I get the hal.dll
error. Through all of this, I just copied the appropriate files from the
installation CD to where they were need, the first 3 to the root of C: and
the hal file to sys32 under windows. With that, I then looked to see what I
had where and fine that I had a boot.ini file, ntldr file, and a
ntdetect.com file on 3 drives for some reason. I know why they were on the
I" drive to start with as you remember, windows wanted to create that space
upon initial installation. They were on my C: drive because I copied them
and I think they were on my E: drive (which was unplugged during initial
installation) due to something with an old xp install, probably my previous
install be fore reloading.
Anyhow, now, I will continue to get a hal.dll file is missing or corrupt
error unless I have the xp pro cd in my drive. If I take the CD out, I get
the error and no boot, but leaving it in, and windows loads just fine.
So, what I am thinking is that I need to delete some files. I mean, with my
configuration, do I need to ntldr and other files on all of those drives?
What should I have where with this configuration given that I had to setup
that I: drive and that I want to boot into my raptor drive which contains my
OS? Seems simple, but for the likes of me, not sure what to do next and
thought I would ask. Below, is what each boot.ini file says:
C: drive:
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
E: drive:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect
I: drive:
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect
Remember, my E: drive is just a data drive. I hope someone can help and
thank you again for reading all of this. I just wanted to be clear and
concise on the setup, what I did and all of that. Thanks much and the help
is much appreciated.
hopeful I can get a clear, concise answer that solves my issue immediately.
I appreciate your reading this and your patience and thoughtfulness in
answering it.
So I reloaded windows on my computer completely whipping out the old
install. No problems there and all went as planned. My computer setup
consists of the following:
SATA Raptor 72gig drive (primary SATA) - 2 partitions, 1 - 40gig (label C
and 1- 30gig (label D
SATA Maxtor 250gig drive (secondary SATA) (label F
IDE Maxtor 120gig drive (primary IDE) (label E
IDE Maxtor 40gig drive (secondary IDE) (label G
IDE ZIP 100 (label B
IDE CD/DVD-RW Drive (label H
Anyhow, I partition the Raptor drive because I like to have my OS on the
30gig partition along with things like my anti-virus software, winzip, etc..
while on the 40gig drive I generally put fast games like Half Life 2 or
Battlefiled 2.
Anyhow, I had to mess around to get windows in the initial installation of
XP Pro top recognize the Raptor SATA drive as being where I wanted drive C:
to be. I also had to allocate 8mb for some reason to another IDE drive and
in doing so, created an I: drive which merely consist of a boot.ini file, an
ntldr file, and a ntdetect.com file. So it is relatively small, but for some
reason, I did not see any way around this. After getting all installed, I
did not care for the drive letters assigned to certain drives so I therefore
used Partition Magic 8 to re-label the drives to the drive letters of my
choice. While doing this, I was careful as to not mess with any drive that
was a system or boot drive as I have had problems with that in the past.
Anyhow, all seemed fine, I patched everything with auto updates and
proceeded to move forward in setting things up. In that, I finally removed
my Windows XP CD to load other CD's of things I needed. Anyhow, when
rebooting, I get the famed ntldr is missing error. Fine, I simple go into
recovery console to correct. In doing so, I just copied both the ntldr and
the ntdetect.com files to the root of my C: drive. After rebooting again,
then I got some kind of boot.ini issue/error, but it still proceeded to boot
into windows just fine. And then finally, after that, I get the hal.dll
error. Through all of this, I just copied the appropriate files from the
installation CD to where they were need, the first 3 to the root of C: and
the hal file to sys32 under windows. With that, I then looked to see what I
had where and fine that I had a boot.ini file, ntldr file, and a
ntdetect.com file on 3 drives for some reason. I know why they were on the
I" drive to start with as you remember, windows wanted to create that space
upon initial installation. They were on my C: drive because I copied them
and I think they were on my E: drive (which was unplugged during initial
installation) due to something with an old xp install, probably my previous
install be fore reloading.
Anyhow, now, I will continue to get a hal.dll file is missing or corrupt
error unless I have the xp pro cd in my drive. If I take the CD out, I get
the error and no boot, but leaving it in, and windows loads just fine.
So, what I am thinking is that I need to delete some files. I mean, with my
configuration, do I need to ntldr and other files on all of those drives?
What should I have where with this configuration given that I had to setup
that I: drive and that I want to boot into my raptor drive which contains my
OS? Seems simple, but for the likes of me, not sure what to do next and
thought I would ask. Below, is what each boot.ini file says:
C: drive:
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
E: drive:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect
I: drive:
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect
Remember, my E: drive is just a data drive. I hope someone can help and
thank you again for reading all of this. I just wanted to be clear and
concise on the setup, what I did and all of that. Thanks much and the help
is much appreciated.