Boot.ini Xp home Problem

[cmacdawg]

my friends Netbook had fake virus protection and was really a bad virus.
I tried to remove it with software, but it was a pain and nothing important was on it anyways, so i put a fresh copy of xp home. Now since it was a netbook there was no internal cd drive and I don't own an external one. What I did was copy xp home from a disk to a memory stick using WinToFlash. That all seemed to work, it booted fine and had a beer for celebration. Xp home was loaded, installed all the drivers and software and was good to go. Restarted the computer and received a deadly message "<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
please re install a copy of the above file" file corrupt or missing"
Now when i insert the memory stick and turn it on, the boot menu pops up and i can boot from xp home, but only if its in.
So I think it has something to do with the boot.ini file because it was installed using the memory stick. I just find it weird i can put the stick in with it, boot it up, take the memory stick out, and it works perfect. If you have any idea
please let me know ,chris

 

[davidireland]

I don't think it is boot.ini because the fact that you got that message suggests to me that the windows partition had already been booted to. boot.ini is a text file that tells the system what partition to look on for a particular operating system. Since you are getting a HAL.dll error, you must have already booted to the partition!

You might need to install XP a different way, such as using sysprep (google it) or another method to allow windows to be transferred to one machine to another. You cannot just copy and paste XP from one drive to another if it is different hardware. You must prepare an existing version of windows by using something like sysprep to add in necessary drivers and other missing files.

Edit: I forgot when I was replying that you said you CAN boot when you have the usb stick in. Im curious...how exactly did you perform this transfer of XP? Maybe that will help determine what the problem could be.