The other day I ran Scandisk on my pc, perhaps the first time I have done so, and enabled it to check the surface area for errors. There was an error during the scan, and upon restarting the system, I received the error message, "hal.dll could not be found". I tried to solve this problem by extracting the necessary file from a Windows XP CD, but then got a "ntoskrnl.exe could not be found" message. I tried playing around at the dos prompt, and one of the things I tried was, I think, "fixboot". I then installed Windows XP Home Edition on a different partition to the Professional one, and that went OK. I was able to access the other partitions, and one of the things I did was to copy the System32 folder of the new installation to the old one, which probably wasn't the best idea. After a while I began experiencing problems with the new XP installation, it saying that it had to shut down every few minutes, giving a 60 second countdown, as something wasn't working right. I tried running Scandisk again, from the new XP installation on the partition of the old XP installation, and received another error on a blue screen saying something about the kernel. Upon restarting I got the error "Operating System not found". There was no disk in the floppy drive, and the hard drive seems to be connected to the motherboard fine. I don't know if it is relevant, but one of my fans may not have been functioning perfectly as it was emitting a constant, fluctuating volume, whirring noise. Sorry about the length of this message, but I thought the more I could tell the better. Does anyone know what I can do?

Try this site. http://www.theeldergeek.com/r.htm

i had a similar problem with 2 os when i accidently made both partitions active. make sure only one partition is active