Further to my problem w/ SP2 in the following thread: http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/116013.html Here is more problem - when I was reformatting and reinstalling XP SP1 on my C: (NTFS), I unplugged my 2nd HD to avoid any accidental erasure of data. After successful installation and turned off the com, replugging the 2nd HD (FAT32) back in, it said:- "missing or corrupted file WINDOWS\system32\hal.dll. Pls replace with your backup" Unplugging the 2nd HD, everything back to normal. What's wrong? I'm sure the jumper on the C: is either at Cable Select or Master with Slave. 2nd HD also is a slave. Just don't know why because it has never happened before even when I reinstalling XP numerous time before.

Not sure but possibly running SFC /SCANNOW will restore the DLL you need.

run it from repair on XP CD?

Not sure what HAL is I seem to have it on one of my PC's and not on the other - have a feeling its related to Direct3D. No help I know, just musing :-)

check this out. http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000490.htm

Thx everyone for your advice. It was actually due to my steps in partitioning my 80G HD which created sort of another boot table or something, which caused XP to look for the boot info from there, which is not existing. So, by giving up partitioning my HD, I fdisk it again, reformatted it, reinstalled XP once again and now it is OK.

lol you didn't have to reformat or reinstall, all you had to do was edit the ARC notation inside the BOOT.ini file (which is usually always located in the root folder of drive C:) Learn ARC notation and edit the C:\BOOT.ini file next time that problem happens and you can save yourself a LOAD of unnecessary work! Take it from me, I had to do the same thing recently (editing that file). The boot.ini file is needed if your NT/2K/XP installation WINDOWS folder is located in a partition which is outside of the first 1024 cylinders of a hard disk. If your WINDOWS folder is outside of that range then you need to have a partition (ideally a separate partition just for your swap file as well) that has the BOOT.ini file on it to specify exactly where (what partition) the NTLDR program can load your Windows from. BOOT.ini uses ARC notation, which you can learn from this site: http://www.yale.edu/pclt/BOOT/nt.htm