[lucretia1987]

Hi
Apologies in advance for a long winded post.
But I'm not sure what is causing my problem so I'll outline its history.
I'm trying to set up a dual boot system Win98 and XP, on seperate drives.
HD1 a Western Digital 10G running existing Win 98 installation and HD2 Maxtor 60G which I tried to load Win XP onto and ran into problems.
Firstly, I setup HD2 to have a data partition as FAT32 and then I formatted a second partition NTFS to put XP onto.
When starting to install XP it couldn't see the 2nd partition on HD2, so I told it to format and install on the partition it COULD see, the FAT32 one.
I then got the "hal.dll missing or corrupt" error message when Windows XP setup rebooted prior to going into the GUI bit.
I can still run Win98 on HD1, thankfully.
Looking at HD2 with partition editing software shows it's now got lots of little tiny partitions on it. What the...?
So I tried to delete them but unable to.
I read that this problem at XP setup with hal.dll could be due to using a DDO (dynamic drive overlay) which I HAD used (MAXBLAST 3) on HD2 and to remove said DDO. Well according to the DDO maintenance software, there is no DDO on the drive (now?).
So I've tried editing BOOT.INI but that is tricky - I'm not sure which disk or partition it's talking about.
My original boot.ini after the failed XP install reads thus:

[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=signature(1)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
signature(1)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
C:\ = "Microsoft Windows"

Any ideas, anyone?

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when your computer starts, are you getting the windows xp, choose OS menu yet?

[gerryf]

when your computer starts, are you getting the windows xp, choose OS menu yet?

[lucretia1987]

Yes - the XP install has gotten as far as putting in the OS choice menu - XP Professional is the default and top choice, Win 98 second choice.
Machine if left to boot alone will default to XP and hang at the "hal.dll missing or corrupt" message.

[lucretia1987]

Fiddling with boot.ini has produced no solution.
I am going to try rebuilding it / repair it again with the WinXP CD.
If that doesn't work, am going to open the case and disconnect win98 drive, put XP drive as master and blow away all the partitioning etc on it before doing a fresh XP install.

/begin whine
This is such a pain to have to do because I am trying to care for a baby and a preschooler. So 'puta time is limited. To be without operational PC is hard. Arrrrgh. Idea behind running XP was to have a stable system again (ROFL). Dual booting was my way to keep 'puta going while slowly migrating software to XP in case something won't work with XP SP2 ...
/end whine