XP Home SP2 Boot.ini help needed

[Frank]

Out of the blue my desktop will not boot.
Messages are like boot.ini problem AND
windows\system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupted, copy a version... etc

From many archives copied hal.dll ... did not fix the problem.
On the KB found 330184, booted from XP CD, (loaded my RAID drivers), etc.
bootcfg /list found Windows
bootcfg /rebuild ran fine, then added the option /fastdetect
Exited and rebooted.

System still will not boot, same initial messages

 

[Jerry]

Try booting from the XP CD and do a repair install.

 

[Frank]

Did that twice on your suggestion.
Now get to Windows but will not boot in Safe, Safe Command Prompt,
Normal or Last Good....

Repair seemed to run fairly quickly (having done that before)
Suggestions?

Am wondering if upgrading to XP Pro might cure the problem.

 

[Glen]

Out of the blue my desktop will not boot.
Messages are like boot.ini problem AND
windows\system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupted, copy a version... etc

From many archives copied hal.dll ... did not fix the problem.
On the KB found 330184, booted from XP CD, (loaded my RAID drivers), etc.
bootcfg /list found Windows
bootcfg /rebuild ran fine, then added the option /fastdetect
Exited and rebooted.

System still will not boot, same initial messages

Have you ran chkdsk across the drive?.

 

[Frank]

This really got weird
The 1st and 15th of the month I do a disk image backup using Acronis
TrueImage.
I had to go back to August 2008 to get a bootable image on the HD.
Then use the February 15th copy to update files, etc.

Strange, thanks for the helpful hints