I'm triple booting with 1 copy of W98 and 2 of XP pro on 2 hard drives. On my main copy of XP I'm getting the message "windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <windows root>system32\hal.dll. Please reinstall a copy of the above file" When I look at that partition from a different OS all I see where the XP should be is unformated space. Is there a command I can use with ASR to copy that file to the bad install of XP? I tried the easy ones, fixmbr and the like. Helllllllpppp! (THANKS) waldo
WALDO

Unfortunately, that error message is just the symptom. It's what is reported when the boot loader can't load the rest of the OS. It is almost always, far more wrong than just that file. In your case you cannot access that partition from within the other XP installation. Your filesystem on that installation's partition, is most likely hosed. It can also just be incorrect entries in boot.ini but it sounds worse in your case.

I knew it was pretty bad, chief. My dad tripped and "jostled" the small stand that pc sits on while the pc was running that particular XP install. Lost only a small amount of actual data that was on the desktop but I would still like to have been able to retrieve it. Oh well, think I'm gonna just format that whole drive, W98 and all, hell I hardly even boot into it at all anymore. THANK YOU GROGAN! (good to see you around)........waldo
WALDO