Two XP's on one HDD, not working

[Stereo Steve]

I have just partitioned a hard drive into C and D. I stuck XP Pro on the first partiton which worked fine. I then ran settup again, formatted the second partition and installed XP on that. It copied the files and then went for the first reboot and stopped, saying the file System32/hal.dll was missing or corrupt. It will boot to the other OS no problem. The file hal.dll is there and I have tried replacing it with the one from the first installation and I have also reformated the second partition with the same result.

Now, when I boot, I get the OS menu I have set to default to the first OS after 3 seconds but if I select the second OS, I get the hal.dll message.

Any ideas? I had this working before on seperate hard drives.

[JohnAd]

Originally posted by Stereo Steve
Any ideas? I had this working before on seperate hard drives.

From memory you always used to have to have a small first partition to get the second one to boot (I think the limit for the first 2 is 8GB). So if you've got a big disk divided into 2 then the second partition might not be bootable. I used to partition 2, 2, Shared. so for a 120Gb go 2 2 116 or 3 3 114.

John

[Mr_Belowski]

With XP the partition size shouldn't really matter.

I used to work in Dixon's PC service call centre (shudder...) and we saw this error a lot on the new (at the time) XP boxes.

If memory serves me correctly, hal.dll gets modified on bootup if the system's hardware configuration has changed, but problems with it can be a real pain in the bum. One of the first things we'd try was to make a change in the computer's bios.

Try this: go to the BIOS setup and find the power management options. Don't change anything drastic (like enabling or disabling APIC, ACPI, and other stuff) but see if you can find a suspend / standby mode option. It's usually set to "S1: POS" or "S3: STR" (power-on standby & suspend to ram respectively).

Change that option to whatever it's not set to, save the changes and try to boot the OS that's not working. If it still doesn't work, try changing something else in bios like disabling the CDRom IDE channel and rebooting.

As a last resort, copy the hal.dll file from your XP installation CD (if you can find the file - I don't know where it usually is, but you might need to trawl through the .cab files) to overwrite the broken one. Of course, you'll need to boot OS 1 to overwrite OS number 2's broken file.

[Elwood]

Have a read of THIS