winxp installed with bootcamp and parallels

Hi, I am new to this posting and forums, in fact lost my first thread, I think it got deleted as I rushed and post it in anything goes. sorry.

Ok, helping a friend, (trying), they installed winxp in bootcamp, then with parallels, not sure how? But in OSx I can see a hdd XP in finder and desktop, at some point they tried uninstalling parallels and failed so re-installed parallels 4. When I open their bootcamp assistant it wants to start as if it had never been used to partition the Mac hdd, yet if on restart we press alt we see two HDD's the osx and winxp. Once in XP cannot see bootcamp. My question, how can you tell if you are looking at a virtual or real partition and why does bootcamp assistant not show anything? Also if launching winxp from desktop on mac os, the desktop hdd icon with xp seems to get sucked in and no longer on desktop. Sorry if this makes no sense but hard to work with a mac user that not sure on what they did. All this came about as they could not enter windows as after pressing alt and choosing winxp, a black screen would appear and say some hal.dll missing so they would then press continually f8 and enter safe mode, there they had two choices, 1 start as win xp or 2 win professional, they had to choose win professional as the win xp would just hang. As you can see still able to use win xp but not clear what is going on? Thank you, I do hope I can find this thread next time!

Very confusing post, sorry. I think given the "hall.dll" error, that a couple of things may have happened. First, on one of the windows install, the one of the ".ini" files got corrupted. Please search for "hal.dll" on this forum and you'll find fixes. Also, given that at some point there was a choice between two windows versions, it sounds like there are multiple windows installs on this Mac - and that may be part of the problem.

I think the safest bet here is to boot into OSX, open Boot Camp assistant and restore the partition - wipe it out and start over. You could then check to see if the Parallels virtual machine still works. If it does, and your friend doesn't need Boot Camp, then you're set. If it doesn't work, or your friend needs both Boot Camp and Parallels virtual machines, then assuming you only have one copy of Windows, go ahead and delete the Parallels VM.

Once you're back to a clean OSX machine (with just the Parallels software installed but no virtual machines), then start over in Boot Camp with the Windows XP SP2 (or SP3) disk. That's what's needed for a successful BC XP installation (and if it was not a single disk, retail or OEM copy of XP SP2 or SP3, that might have been part of the problem too). Once you have installed XP successfully in Boot Camp, then you can start Parallels - it should see the BC installation and offer to create a VM for you from it. Note that the guest tools must also be installed in Parallels or you'll run into activation issues.

Hope this helps but it sounds like your best bet is to start over, to be honest.

Good luck!

To the OP:

Follow the advice given by SammySlim. You've got a botched install and a more than likely corrupt system file (boot.ini) causing the hal.dll error.

Some more advice: Either use Boot Camp or Parallels, not both. Using a Boot Camp partition to run as a VM has been the cause of corruption for many folks. Happens with XP often enough, so use caution. If you install Vista, you should be OK running it both ways.

Regards.

winxp installed with bootcamp and parallels part 2

Hi SammySlim and chscag! Thank you for your help, I am so glad that my posting worked, yes it is a confusing post, sorry difficult to explain the miss mash of things. Since this post, they tell me that it has been solved but I find this doubtful as there was no concern on their part of the many different win xp versions they had.

1st: when in OSX and I see an icon on desktop and finder that is a HDD with Win XP, how can I tell if this is a bootcamp created hdd after partitioning the drive or a virtual HDD icon?

2nd: still from within OSX, if I launch the bootcamp assistant, it starts as if I am going to partition the drive for the first time as it does not show me two partitions already there, ie OSX and WINXP, shouldn't it show this so that if you wanted to claim back your (they partitioned with 20GB for WinXP) 20 GB or if you wanted to make it bigger?

Again thank you very much for all your help.

1st question: Yes, that's your Boot Camp partition.

2nd question: When running the Boot Camp assistant again from OS X, it will not show you the partitions. Your only choice would be to delete the Boot Camp partition and start over. You do that by selecting create partition, restore.

Once a Boot Camp partition has been created, it can not be re-sized using Boot Camp. It must be deleted and re-created as the new size. However, there are third party utilities which can be used to overcome that limitation. If you need to re-size, please post back.

Regards.

Hi again chscaq,

Thank you for your reply and help. Yes, we do need to re-size, any idea how this can be done with 3rd party apps as would prefer not to delete.

Thank you again for replying so soon!

mopt said:

Hi again chscaq,

Thank you for your reply and help. Yes, we do need to re-size, any idea how this can be done with 3rd party apps as would prefer not to delete.

Thank you again for replying so soon!

Click to expand...

You can try the free Paragon software, "Camp Tune". Link

Make sure you backup everything first!

Regards.

Thanks for all your help!! As this is not for me directly it will take a while.

But truly, thanks for helping so soon.