Just built a new box and wanted to move my SATA hard drives to the new box and keep my XP installation intact. Usually I do the repair installation through XP setup and have no problems, but was having trouble with that. I read somewhere that initiating a XP Upgrade on the old box and continuing it on the new box should make the process easier (not true). So I initiated the upgrade and when rebooting, turned machine off and moved hardware over to new box. Had some issues with the new box that were unrelated but was finally able to boot. Now the problem I had was I had two entries in the boot menu when booting from my C: drive. One was Windows XP Pro and the other was Windows XP Pro Setup. When I chose the setup, to try to continue the upgrade installation, it freezes. When trying to do a repair installation (not recovery console), it does not detect my previous Windows installation.
In any case, I was able to boot into XP using the fix_hdc in UBCD4win. I should have just stopped there, but I wanted to get rid of the Windows XP Setup load identifier, so I went ahead and tried to rebuild Boot.ini. That did not remove the Windows XP setup entry, but now I can't boot into XP because I keep getting the error that HAL.dll is missing or corrupt. Tried replacing HAL.dll with the dll on the disk, but was still getting that error. Did some research and the HAL.DLL error is due to a corrupt Boot.ini. So now, I need to get back to where I was, specifically, get rid of the HAL.DLL error and boot into XP. I tried rebuilding Boot.ini so many times now, I have like 8 different load identifiers and don't know how to get rid of them. HELP
CPU Specs below
EVGA p55 SLI
Core i7 860
4GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600
80GB SATA HD (Boot Disk)
1TB SATA HD
24x DVD\CD RW Sony Optiarc
ATI Radeon HD 4670
CoolerMaster Storm Scout Case
Thanks!
