I finally got over the initial shock of not being able to load windows XP after installing it yesterday...certainly being able to boot to my old familiar W2K helped restore some mental equilibrium (along with the requisite amount of caffeine) and from here I definitely have a bit more hope that I can fix it somehow.
Here's the quick back-story: At the end of an almost (?) successful setup of a dual boot system (WIN2K Pro is the original OS, I'm adding XP Pro to a different hard drive) I got the following when the installation attempted the last restart to open XP:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file
XP seems to be completely installed, when I access my H drive (the one I installed XP on) I find what looks like the entire directory, when I open the system32 folder in the root directory the hal.dll file is there (all 81,152 delinquent bytes of it) but I still don't know how to "reinstall" it or convince windows that it's really a GOOD uncorrupted file...
I cannot get it to boot to XP in safe mode no matter how trickily I manipulate the F8 and Enter keys during startup...
I did manage to boot from the CD to get to a "repair XP" install and that opened the recovery console, but I haven't a clue where to go from there or what to type so I exited. There now are 3 options at the boot-loader prompt instead of 2, the choices are now: Boot to WIN2K, boot to XP Pro or to go to the WinXP Pro Recovery Setup.
So what's next?
Here's the quick back-story: At the end of an almost (?) successful setup of a dual boot system (WIN2K Pro is the original OS, I'm adding XP Pro to a different hard drive) I got the following when the installation attempted the last restart to open XP:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file
XP seems to be completely installed, when I access my H drive (the one I installed XP on) I find what looks like the entire directory, when I open the system32 folder in the root directory the hal.dll file is there (all 81,152 delinquent bytes of it) but I still don't know how to "reinstall" it or convince windows that it's really a GOOD uncorrupted file...
I cannot get it to boot to XP in safe mode no matter how trickily I manipulate the F8 and Enter keys during startup...
I did manage to boot from the CD to get to a "repair XP" install and that opened the recovery console, but I haven't a clue where to go from there or what to type so I exited. There now are 3 options at the boot-loader prompt instead of 2, the choices are now: Boot to WIN2K, boot to XP Pro or to go to the WinXP Pro Recovery Setup.
So what's next?