09-23-2008, 03:31 PM

so i used boot camp to partiton my 250 gig hard drive and installed ubuntu on it, but then deleted ubuntu and installed xp. now im getting the corrupt or missing system32 hal.dll error. i cant run the recovery console from the xp disk that i have. but i have a copy of the universal boot disk. after looking around i have no idea how to fix it. can anyone help me?

09-26-2008, 01:36 PM

It won't let you go into Recovery, or you don't have the option?

09-26-2008, 03:24 PM

andrewbossie:

If you can "see" your Windows partition from OS X and can write to it (FAT-32), take a close look at your "boot.ini" file which resides in the root of drive c. The file is system hidden and is plain text.

Anyway, this file is a pointer file which points the Windows XP bootloader to the correct partition and system folder. If the file is missing, corrupt, or has incorrect information, you will get the infamous missing "hal.dll" error.

Which by the way has nothing to do with the file being missing - Windows is unable to find it because boot.ini is wrong.

This web site give an excellent explanation of boot.ini with instructions on how to read and correct it:

http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/mbr/bootini.htm

Regards.