I have an OEM machine, a Packard Bell iConnect. I bought a new hard drive (Seagate 160GB), installed XP Pro into it in partition 2. The first partition has not OS. For some reason, the OS wont boot (to complete the installation) in this machine but will boot in another non-oem machine. And in that machine, I can complete the setup and log into windows. On my machine (the oem one), even after completing the setup on another machine, it gives me an error about a missing or corrupted file: <system root>\windows\system32\hal.dll

This is the Windows "Hardware Abstraction Layer" file and is specific to the individual computer and its hardware. 1. Access the recovery console 2. Try running bootcfg/ rebuild from the console 3. Try Start>Run>CMD. sfc/sfc.exe with the original Win XP disk in place The system file checker (sfc) tool scans all protected files to verify their versions and repopulates the %Systemroot%\System32\Dllcache folder with correct versions, as described above.(This is from www.http://sft-cyber.com)

1. Your boot.ini is either missing or is incorrect. 2. There is also a possibility that your BIOS is pointing to the wrong device as your boot device. How many hard drives are there? if more than one then what is the IDE configuration? What partition types have you defined? Normally with WinXP, even if you install it in a different partition to the first active partition, the boot files (inc boot.ini) will still reside on the first active drives primary partition. How did you install WinXP? ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

Thanx, u guyz, for ur help. I finally figured out what the matter was: It turns out that my bios only detects 140 (exactly 137) GB on the 160 gig disk. Incidentally, as the first partition is 137 GB, the bios detected only that 1 partition and, therefore, couldnt find the OS, which was in the 2nd partition. Now, the solution: I installed the os on the 1st partition, which initially did not have an os installed; formatted the 2nd partition; and, then, editted the boot.ini file accordingly - ie, to boot from 1st partition. I HOPE SOMEONE WILL FIND THIS USEFUL TO THEM for general computer knowledge or for troubleshooting their machines.