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#1
I have Dual Boot problems (Win 7 & XP)
I have one hard drive. It's divided in 4 partitions (I did 3, Windows did 1). First I installed Win 7 RC 64-bit, which ended up on partition 2 as Windows created a 100 MB System Reserved as partition 1. Then I installed Win 7 64-bit again on the third partition. I managed to use BCDEDIT to change boot order and names of the two OS's. Everything worked fine.
Then I installed Windows XP 32-bit on the last partition. When booting, I could no longer choose the Windows 7 installation. I saw that Windows XP now had copied a boot.ini file to the C:\ drive (now the System Reserve Drive in XP). I tried to fiddle with that file bit to no avail. I then renamed the file so Win wouldn't see it, and rebooted, in hopes that the lack of boot.ini would trigger Win 7 boot system instead.
Well, I was wrong (you can laugh). Now when I boot it says "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll. Please re-install a copy of that above file.
If someone could help me get back, I would greatly appreciate it.
Things I'm thinking:
Maybe delete the XP partition in the Win 7 install menu, but I'm thinking XP may have put more files on the C:\ drive that needs to be removed anyway.
Run repair from the Win 7 install DVD?
Run a DOS prompt so I can rename boot.ini again so I at least can get back into XP and go from there. How do you start a DOS prompt? I have Win XP and Win 7 install DVDs.
Thanks,
Don