[WhatThe]

Hello everyone

I needed to create a dual boot 98/XP machine, from a machine which already had XP installed and working well for a long time.

There was only one partiton to start with

I have used partition magic to resize the partition and move it to allow for a small partition at the start of the drive, I did this because of the PQmagic warning about the 98SE 8GB boot limit.

After thinking about that I dont think I needed to move the XP partition because if I had left the partition where it was XP would handle the initial boot sequence?

So what I have now is a machine which boots hapily into XP or 98, but I have to use PQmagic rescue disks to make each partition active to change operating sytems.

I have modified the boot.ini (in windows xp when its partition is active) file as follows,

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)\WINDOWS="98" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

I get a boot option menu, however when I choose 98 I get the following error,

Windows could not start because the follwing file is missing or corrupt <windows root>system32\hal.dll

Is hal.dll a xp only thing?

any help would make my day, thanks

Please

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No Ideas?

[WhatThe]

No Ideas?

[peterm]

Have a read of this. I run 98se & xp and no problems.
98 xp boot
and this
more 98 xp
I run mine as fat 32 for 98 & xp

Edited by peterm, 22 August 2005 - 05:46 PM.

[Bill Berditzman]

If you have the dreaded hal.dll file missing or corrupted do a repair from a xp boot and at the repair prompt do chkdsk /f If that doesn't fix it, do a low level format and start over.