hal.dll problem on multiOS drives

I

Ian Hodgson

New Member
I am having the hal.dll corrupt or missing problem.
I read tlarkin's solution but am not sure how to proceed.
I have two SATA drives, one with XP pro and the other with XP home.
I recently installed some new software on XP home (which is the second drive) i.e. XP pro has the boot.ini
I reset from the xphome drive to the xppro drive but later after trying to go back to the xphome drive I got the hal.dll message and so cannot boot into this drive.
I examined the boot.ini file and all is OK there. I tried uncoupling the "xppro" drive and just boot from the "xphome" drive but got the same message. I can still boot into the xppro drive ok.

How do I resolve this? Do I boot onto the recovery console of the xppro drive or of the "xphome" drive? and carry out the rebuild? Or is there another way? (Why did all this occur anyway??)
Thanks.
 
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The boot.ini and mbr are located on the first sata with XP Pro. When you unplugged that you lost the essential ntldr file and boot information. To have the second XP Home drive as a stand alone and no longer dual boot the two versions you would then boot to the recovery console and enter the "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands to see that write a new mbr.

If that should fail(unlikely but possible) the repair install option would then be used to separate the two drives along with removing the XP Home reference in the XP Pro boot.ini file. Here I triple boot Vista along with both 32bit versions of XP at the present time but will have to reinstall XP Home and Vista when a new board eventually goes in. Some general tips on the Hal.dll can also be looked over at http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findbyerrormessage/a/missinghaldll.htm
 
Thanks PC Eye,

So are you saying that I shouldn't attempt to replace the hal.dll from the original CD? Does the hal.dll file change or something? The file on the original Win XPPro disk is 51.9 Kb but the file on my HDD/...sytsem32 is 128 Kb and the file on my Win Home HDD/...system32 is 51.9 Kb?

I am not sure what to do. I want to keep both OS's and if I really have to I am willing to do an image replace using Acronis. I have one for each OS but they are pretty out of date (silly me!).

Do I need to use the fixboot and fixmbr commands? I tried using the bootcfg /rebuild but that just added two more lines to the boot.ini file so that the lines were repeated and I had four choices (one of them changed the rdisk parameter from 1 to 2???) Any way I deleted tham and went back to the original. Didn't fix the hal problem of course.

Thanks.
 
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Well I have fixed the hal.dll problem. I didn't realize the replacement file had to come from a service pack 2 source. When I did that all went OK. So now have both OS working.
Thanks for the guidance.
 
The fixboot and fixmbr commands are generally only used when you have a problem loading Windows on the boot drive itself. When dual booting only one drive is determined as the boot drive. The order of the lines in the boot.ini will determine which version is default. The new lines can be removed from there since those won't be needed. It's been awhile since having an SP1 disk for the Home version here.

At least you got things back running normal again. With a new board, cpu, and other hardwares going in soon I will be reinstalling Windows all over again. Next time Vista will be separate however.
 
Xp dual boot after Hal.dll replaced

Thanks PCEye. That all makes sense now. I was in for a big shock though when I replaced the hal.dll from the SP2 disk. Some of my drivers went through the found new hardware successfully but some didn't, surprisingly the following had to be re-installed. ATI graphic-card, M-audio sound card, enhanced USB controller (from MB drivers disk) and some other minor ones. No big deal really.
So thanks for help.
 
When installing Vista on a system it always looks for the first ide drive if there's one present or the first sata even when installing it onto a second drive like was done here. But when a first drive is unplugged or fails how do you repair the new version.

That's the easy part now seen over XP with the automatic startup repair tools and no recovery console seen anymore when booting with the installation disk. That now writes a new boot loader on a second drive there.
 
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