I am trying to make a dual boot system with XP Pro installed on a 60 gig hard drive. The other OS is 2000 pro installed on a partition on a 250 gig hard drive. The 60 gig is all one partition. 2000 Pro is installed on the second partition of the 250 gig. I had XP working fine. After I put 2000 pro on the second partition on the 250 gig I started having the problem. I get to the dual boot screen fine after I select XP I get the following error: <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll missing or corrupt. I can get into 2000 pro fine. I have read that it could be that the boot.ini file is missing or corrupt. So I tried going into the recovery console and doing the bootcfg but it doesn't work. Here is what my boot.ini file contains: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" I try manually changing it but when I boot back up to 2000 it's the same as before I changed anything. I've tried everything to try to fix this. Please help. Thanks.

wait for more expert advice, but I think multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" should be multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" Sorry, I do not check for private messages

Thanks for the reply. I make that edit to the boot.ini file and I reboot. But like always when I try to boot up to XP it gives me that error again. Then when I go back into 2000, the boot.ini file is back to what is was before I edited it. Any more ideas?

It seems to me that your pointers to XP Pro are not correct. I'm not at all familiar with WIN2K, so I may be way off base with this, but maybe this will help: Is the 60gb h.d. with the XP your master drive? if so, and if you want to make that your default O/S, the I think you need to correct the partition # and directory designation as noted below: from: default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT to: default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS (didn't you say that the 60gb h.d. has only 1 partition?) I think you would ALSO need to change the partition # in the last line (for XPPro) from "2" to "1", although it appears that the directory is correct.

Thanks guys! Thanks to Computing.Net I found the clue I needed in minutes - instead of struggling on my own for days! My Windows XP Home wouldn't boot - I was getting the hal.dll "corrupt or missing" message. I had to boot into my old Windows2000 partition to access the web and find these web pages. What I'd done was backup my WinXP partition with Partion Magic, install IE7 beta, had problems, then use Partion Magic to delete my WinXP partition and restore the backup. The "corrupt or missing" message didn't mean that there was anything at all wrong with the hal.dll file on my WinXP partition. It simply meant it couldn't find the file because it was looking in the wrong place. And it was looking in the wrong place because the partition number in my boot.ini was wrong. I rebooted into Windows2000, unhid the WinXP partition with Partition Magic, unhid the system files, made a tiny edit to the WinXP boot.ini (changing a "6" to a "3"), then restarted. WinXP was alive and well! juniorck2k4: On my system, partition1 is the RECOVERY partition, Windows2000 uses partition2 and WindowsXP is in partition3. So try changing your boot.ini "partition(2)" to "partition(3)". If that doesn't work, try 4 or 5 or 6! Good luck!