Hey everybody, I am getting real tired of installing and reinstalling this supposedly stable opearting system called Windows XP. I know that my tinkering has probably cost me more problems than not but just when I had XP up and running the way I wanted it, i got this message today XP cannot start hal.dll missing or corrupt. So i jump on the net and do a search and find several solutions to the problem. One. Make sure the boot.ini is correct. Did that and it seemed fine but still recieved message hal.dll missing/corrupt two. boot from the CD and go into repair mode and type bootcfg /rebuild. did that and still got a hal.dll missing/corrupt three. the last solution was to recopy hal.dll from the install disk. did that and then I get XP cannot start ntoskrnl.exe missing/corrupt, so, frustrated I just copied the original ntoskrnl.exe from the install CD and now I get a bunch of dll cannot load error messages and please contact your system admin which is me! LoL So I suppose that I am screwed and will have to install XP all over again. Does anyone have any advice as to any solutions, or am I toast? Everything was running fine today and then I rebooted and got that hal.dll missing/corrupt, and I didn't tweak or adjust anything. Does this just happen at random? One more thing, if i reinstall XP, I am running windows 98 first edition on my C: drive and XP is installed on a second drive with two partitions. second drive is setup like this: D: just for programs and XP is on E:. If I reinstall XP to E; will the boot process be screwed up for Win 98 on drive C: since the multiboot loader was installed when I setup XP? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! System specs: AMD XP1800 1.53 GHZ 256 MB DDR RAM 6 GB Quantum HD C: 40 GB Maxtor D: Programs E: XP All drives FAT 32 nVIDIA TNT2 32MB Graphics Card K7VTA3 Mother Board Win LT 56K Modem Windows 98 First Edition Windows XP Pro

This is the exact error message that I get when trying to boot XP after doing what I have already described. Is there still hope to get this OS back on its feet?! Windows could not start because of an error in the software. Please report this problem as: load needed DLLs for kernel. Please contact your support person to report this problem." Regards

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