WinXP and Win7 dual boot: hal.dll corupted

Sailorcancer

Active Member
Hey,

I had to reinstall Win7. Anyways following the advice from the previous topic I made about dual booting between the two OSs I managed to get into some more trouble.

So some back stories.

- The drive that has Win7 has two partitions. (I don't know why it does it but it does) a 111GB and 200MB partitions. The 200MB one is the active one which is where I need to put the three files from XP. boot.ini, NTDETECT.COM, and ntldr.

- I dediced to try something different and make the 111GB partition the active one and put the three files in there. When I did that I could not boot into either XP or 7. A error saying that hal.dll was corupted and I could not go on would come up. I then had to go into my bios and swap HDDs boot up go into XP make the 200MB partition the active and then deleted the boot.ini, NTDETECT.COM, and ntldr from the 111GB partition. Then swap again in BIOS and I was able to get back into 7.

- So then I assiged a drive letter to the 200MB partition and stuck the boot.ini, NTDETECT.COM, and ntldr in the drive. Went into BCD and told it to boot from that drive letter. Again I get the "hal.dll corrupted".

So what do I do? They want me to reinstall it and I don't know which Hal file is corrupted 7s or XPs.

Thanks for the help.
 
Hi again, Sailorcancer. :smile:
Please post a screenshot of your Disk Management screen, so we can get a better picture of your current situation. :wink: The hal.dll error is usually related to the boot.ini configuration, so please post your boot.ini contents as well.

-Coolname007
 
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DM.png


Is this ok? It is disk 0 and 1.
 
You need to put your XP boot files on the "active" partition on Disk 0, i.e. the "system" partition, (H) that is 200 MBs in size. :wink: That is where they need to be, not the active partition on disk 1. However, make sure to *copy*, not move them over from XP's partition, so you could still get into XP by changing the boot order in the BIOS if you have to.

-Coolname007

EDIT: Realized you said you already did that...
In that case, then please post your boot.ini file.
 
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The hal.dll corrupted/missing message has to do with a misconfigured boot.ini file in regard to attempting to boot XP.

Get EasyBCD 2.0 Beta and re-add your entry for XP. The beta should automatically reconfigure it for you, but if not, go to Tools and select the option to reconfigure boot.ini if upon reboot if it isnt working.
 
ok I'll download the 2.0 and see how that goes.

It might be a bit only because while I was waiting I installed some stuff. So I'm waiting on around 400MB of Office 2007 updates to be done.
 
The hal.dll corrupted/missing message has to do with a misconfigured boot.ini file in regard to attempting to boot XP.

Get EasyBCD 2.0 Beta and re-add your entry for XP. The beta should automatically reconfigure it for you, but if not, go to Tools and select the option to reconfigure boot.ini if upon reboot if it isnt working.

It will configure it *automatically* if you select Yes at the prompt. :wink: Otherwise, if you click No, it wont get reconfigured, and then you'll have to use the "Tools>Auto configure boot.ini" option to have it reconfigure it later.

-Coolname007
 
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