Vista XP w/ 2 hard drives - problems

T

Tabs

Member
Hi,

I just built a new machine and here's the process I went through installing the OS'es. I have two identical SATA 250GB drives, one for Vista (SATA0) and one for XP (SATA1). I installed each OS separately while the other drive was disconnected. Alone or selected via the BIOS boot device screen (F12) they both work fine and boot.

To get the dual boot going using Vista's BCD, I copied boot.ini, ntldr and NTDETECT.COM to the Vista drive, changed rdisk to 1 from 0 so that it points to the 2nd SATA drive and used EasyBCD to create the new entry.

Doesn't work - I'm getting the hal.dll missing/corrupted error...

I know this is exactly the way I set things up on my old machine and it worked fine...

Here's a screen from Vista's Disk Management applet - F: is an external USB drive that wasn't hooked up when the OS installs were done...

manage.jpg


boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
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" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Ryan
 
Last edited:
Setting rdisk to 0 gives me a missing/corrupted ntoskrnl.exe error now... OS still boots just fine if I boot the drive directly from the BIOS, so these errors definitely aren't real problems with the files...

I'm really baffled here.

Addendum:

I just figured out what is causing it - no clue why or how to stop it though.

It's the external HD - if I unplug it, XP boots fine from the menu, if I plug it in, it gives me the hal.dll error...

Absolutely bizarre.
 
Last edited:
I figured it out - yeah the BIOS had tagged the external as drive 2 because I'd plugged it in after installing Vista and the other drive still hadn't been connected yet. I unplugged the drive and reset the BIOS and all is well now - thanks!
 
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