I have a laptop (Dell Inspiron 8100) that shipped with WinXP. I used partition magic 7.0 to resize the NTFS partition, and installed SuSE 7.3 in the empty space in just one / partition and one swap. I made a boot disk with lilo on it. Then I did the familiar trick of: dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/floppy/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1 and then booting to windows, copying the file to c:\bootsect.lnx and adding c:\bootsect.lnx="linux" to c:\boot.ini If I've already lost you, please don't respond. Anyway, this works great on my Win2K/SuSE 7.3 machine. But with XP, everything appears to be in order, and if you choose to boot windows it comes right up. However, if you choose linux, you get an error message that says: "Windows XP cannot load because the file hal.dll is missing or corrupt." This error is not a new one to this board, but almost everyone who reports it recieves the error when trying to boot windows XP. In this case, XP is fine, but Linux will not boot, citing a missing .dll file????? This seems absurd to me. If anyone has any idea why this might be or what I could do to solve it, I would be eternally grateful. This includes a workaround, patch, substitution of grub or lilo for the NT loader (which unfortunately I have been using for a crutch for long enough that I don't know how to boot nt, much less xp from lilo or grub) or even helpful insight about what is going on behind the scenes in the nt loader. Any help would be great. On the other hand, please *do not* post with *any* information about what to do if XP itself won't load due to this message. Similarly, please *do not* post saying that you had this same problem with XP/98. There are literally dozens of threads that talk about these issues, and there is no need to drown this one too. I only say this because I did find one single lonely post with this exact problem, and nobody answered him because three stooges immediately jumped in with XP/98 questions that had already been adressed elsewhere. Thank you to all who can offer any kind of help. Hunter.

i found this page when i was researching how to do the exact same thing (XP/linux dual boot on laptop) http://www.poopoccurs.com/linux/1.html

uhh... is that a misspelling? is it supposed to be hd1.dll or hda1.dll or hal.dll or ha1.dll? Sounds like a crappy windows problem... you say other people cite having the same problem with the same board? where are these posts?