Dual Boot hal.dll Issue with Vista and XP on Second Hard Drive?

AdamL

Member
Jun 11, 2008
69
0
6
I have a Lenovo x61 tablet that I bought a few months ago (love it). The only downside is some program incompatibilities with Vista. So, I recently decided to install Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 on a second HDD that's in my dock's ultrabay hard drive adapter. My hope was to be able to have Vista Business as normal on my laptop, but also the ability to boot into Vista OR XP when my computer is docked.

So with a USB external CD drive (because my second HDD is in the place of my ultrabay CD drive) I formatted my second HD and installed Windows XP. However, after it completed installing and rebooted, I was presented with the following error message:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file."

With BIOS, I changed to boot order so that my primary HDD (Vista) was first, and my comp booted normally into Vista. I checked the system32 folder and the hal.dll file was there. Trying again, I went into BIOS and moved the secondary HDD(XP) to the top and once again I was presented with the hal.dll error message.

How can I fix this?!? I really want to be able to have the dual boot capability.

Thanks for any help!
 
Back
Top