cant find hal.dll

[rizound]

hello people ..I thought I,d share my nightmare with xp pro locking me out of hard drives twice ...The only answer so I,m told is you,ve been microshafted.. ..so I,m shareing my useless xp knowledge with you .and why I,m going to stick windows 2000 next time .I had bought a second hand innocent Athlon1.3 ...PC with xp pro installed I was running IIS 5 with my mac intranet worked great ..that was and loads of work I did fortuanatly I had backed some up on disks..one day my pc stopped at veriyfiying data pool.. After extensive anyliseing a new maxtor 7200 was bought and installed.My second drive lasted 5 days after I installed the only xp disk I had turned out to have only a 180 day licence on it .so i installed windows 2000 first and what I understood to be a second option of xp pro on a dual boot arrangement xp pro installer insisted it was looking after my interests but all the time it was just wanting me to buy my own real xp pro disk ,expensive ... so what you may say well I,m not well off or I would have bought a new system from a shop so I could just send it back when the operating system fell over... cant find hal.dll . this time
any useful communication would be welcome in my dissapointment tried f disk different drive and even ntfsdos .. no sign of window 2000 boot prosedure. guess i,ll take the drive back to shop today more soon I know my mac g4 ,s pretty good but windows is another planet still

 

[BMorey]

I've had this problem. Solved it on the weekend: the boot drive (in BIOS) has to be HDD-0. I had it as HDD-1 (thinking 1 = first). As a result XP was trying to boot off a hard drive that was once a boot disk but no longer was.