Hi,
I had two partitions on one hard drive. There were hidden remnants of my old Windows 98 on C: drive which was a primary FAT32 drive and also the active drive. On the other partition (D
I had Windows XP Pro installed; D: was a logical drive on an extended partition. This was not the active partition and when the computer was booted I was given a choice of OS, obviously I could not use Windows 98 as there were only fragments left. So to claw back the 2GB taken up by the fairly useless C: drive I used Partition Magic 7.0 to delete C: partition, it warned me that this was the active partition but said I could set a new active partition afterwards so I continued. After deleting C: successfully I was told that I could not set D: active. I rebooted and was faced with something like "No OS found" or similar. I worked on this for hours and finally decided to make a new partition in the recently unallocated space I had acquired from removing C: on this I installed another Windows XP Pro. I rebooted and entered the new Windows. This new windows was on C: and I could see my old Windows XP Pro on D:. I wanted to switch over to the old Windows XP which had all my settings. Having learnt that you could only boot from primary partitions I converted D: from logical to primary and set D: active. I then deleted C: and its Windows. This all seemed fine however it would not load so I tried to use a homemade XP floppy boot disk (NTLDR, NTDETECT and a BOOT.INI that I wrote). On booting it said "Invalid BOOT.INI file. Loading C:WINDOWS". But I thought I only had D:WINDOWS?? Anyway this actually started Windows XP but on checking there was no C: to be seen only D: (I even got messages to tell me "Windows could not find C:....". So I tried to change D: letter to C: but this would not work (because on rebooting, which it has to do, Partition Magic had some kind of parameter error). However I could still log on to Windows using my disk. I then went to PQBoot (application attached to Partition Magic) and selected the right partition to boot from. Now when my computer boots I get the message "NTLDR is missing". If I put my floppy disk in thenit recognises the NTLDR on that and continues to load until I get the following message;
"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll . Please reinstall a copy of the above file."
I have loaded the Recovery Console with the XP CD and performed a repair but this made no difference. I have also tried using the command prompt to copy hal.dll from the cd but to no avail. I have corrected the bootcfg many times (using bootcfg /rebuild). One f the main problems (especially when using the command prompt) is that the recovery console believes that my Windows installation is on C: but I know that when I was last in Windows it was definitely on D:. So I think I need tosort out the assigning of drive letters and then try again to copy files at the command prompt. Some exact instructions on what I should type at the command prompt would be useful. Hope you can help and that you have not fallen asleep reading this novel of a question.
Linear Mode
