My computer will not boot at all:
I have a homebuilt machine that worked perfectly until last night. I have 2 harddrives, one new one and the one from my previously built machine. Both drives are XP bootable. I attempted to modify the boot.ini file on my primary drive to allow a direct boot to this particular XP as opposed to selecting which XP to boot from each time I start up.
Since the lines in the boot.ini file were practically identical, except the rdisk(x)partition(x) part of them I decided that I could just delete one and if it happened to be wrong I would go back in and resave my backed up .ini file.
Not the case, it seems. Permissions and whatnot didn’t allow me to change the boot.ini from my old HD to my new HD.
So trying a few things I managed to get to the point that neither XP’s boot. I get an error message about my HAL.dll missing, which is slightly frustrating.
I booted to my XP cd and can get into recovery console at the C:\(new) and D:\(old)
I ran out of time and had to get to bed, but I wanted to be able to just go home and get it fixed. What type of commands should I give at the prompt?
1. I was going to type get to C:\Windows\System32 and type:
(e is my cdrom) copy E:\Windows\System32\HAL.dll to get the hal in there
2. Fuss with the bootcfg utility. However, I’m very unrehearsed with this, as I’m rarely foolish enough to neglect researching something as important as boot.ini before modifying. Any ideas for bootcfg /switches? Can I rebuild it from a one-line command?
Thanks for the help.
