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October 31, 2006 at 12:39 PM
johnsonhw

Dual Systems

by johnsonhw . Updated 19 years, 8 months ago

I need to repair the power socket attached to the Motherboard in a HP Pavilion Laptop. The repair shop is estimating the work will take two to five days. I need to use the hard drive and operating system while the laptop is in the shop.

I have removed the hard drive from the laptop and using a USB drive holder have connected to a desktop in the office. I would like to setup the desktop to run the USB hard drive as a separate dual drive operating system.

On the desktop (c)I have changed the BOOT.INI file in notepad to read as follows:

[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition on 1st Drive”
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT=”Microsoft Windows Recovery Console” /cmdcons
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional on 2nd Drive”

On the other drive (f)the BOOT.INI file reads:

[boot loader]
timeout=0
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional on 2nd Drive”

When the desktop computer restarts the three systems appear from the desktop BOOT.INI file. If I select the Windows Home Edition OS the computer starts with no problem. If I select the Windows XP Professional Edition the following error screen appears:

The following file is missing or corrupted and the file listed is \system32\hal.dll. What have I done wrong? I used Jim Aspinwall’s #94 Article “Hack the Windows NT/2000/XP Boot Loader” article.

Thank you for your help.

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