I don't see how you can blame the CD drive disappearing from the bios screen on WinXP. The id of your drives is performed long before the system gets to the boot sequence for XP. You have some other issue going on there. You never have let us know what hardware you are running.
All that other mess looks to be the result of a partial installation of the recovery console that you aborted. I've stopped a lot of program installations when I didn't like what was happening but never stop a major Microsoft install. I don't see any need to install the recovery console on the hard drive. That option would really be for systems that didn't have or couldn't boot from the cd. So you need to figure out how to get rid of the partial installation. You boot.ini isn't getting corrupted it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do. You are correct in a way that the boot.ini is for a dual boot system. If you install the recovery console on the HD you will get a dual boot option, WinXP or the recovery console. If you had completed the installation the setup line would have been replace with a line pointing to the recovery console. Try repairing your installation. Boot from the cd. On the first screen you'll get three options install, repair with the recovery console, exit. Choose install WinXP. Then you'll get a second screen where it detects your original installation and asks if you want to repair it. Go ahead and run repair. This ought to fix your boot problem and restore the system. That's the easiest way and it's saved me a couple of times when I did something to screw the system up. If you have problems let me know I'll walk you through it. The recovery console is a great tool if you know specifically what is wrong. It has some options for repairing the boot record but I think the repair I mentioned above is what you need to do in this case. Have installed SP1? I would reinstall it after you fix my system. I don't know why you are having so many problems with XP. If your hardware is fairly current, 3 years old or less, it should run great. This operating system is by far the best thing Microsoft has put out. I'm continually amazed at how easily it handles things the older Windows versions couldn't, wouldn't handle. I started out thinking I would install XP on one system just to see what it was like and was prepared not to like it. Now I've installed it on all my systems and am encouraging all my clients that can to install it too. Ben Moore ----- Original Message ----- From: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, March 07, 2003 4:05 AM Subject: PCWorks: hal.dll keeps getting corrupted in XP > Oh well, looks like it's back to win98 yet again. I see I'm > not alone with this problem, but still cannot find out from > anywhere WHY it is happening, WHAT is causing it to happen, > and HOW to STOP It from happening. Apparently, my boot.ini > keeps getting screwed up! > > A few days ago was the first time this happened, and since it > happened on a test run of XP on another HD, I put it off as > being a HD problem. Obviously it's not. I put XP Pro on my > good main HD, everything went perfect....up until now. I > restarted minutes ago, and the SAME thing happened. Would not > boot. Screen said the same thing about hal.dll being missing > or corrupted. I found out that the boot.ini file will cause > this, or, maybe it's the hal.dll file that is causing the > boot.ini file to get corrupted. Which is it, and what is > causing this? ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
