Hal.dll error

I have 2 hard drives.

I just did a is a fresh reinstall of my OS on my C:\ drive, so I thought it would be the ideal time to backup that partition & overwrite my 2 backup installations using Acronis (one on the same drive, & one on the second hard drive), which were originally cloned from my C:\ drive using Acronis.

Everything went fine, until I tried to boot up to the partition on my second hard, and got the following error:
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Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\hal.dll
Please reinstall a copy of the above file
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I searched for answer, & came upon some advice that suggested to "check for proper boot order in BIOS. You might see the hal.dll error if the boot order in BIOS is first looking at a hard drive other than your main hard drive".

I went into my BIOS and switched the order of my hard drives (1 to 2, 2 to 1), which placed my second hard drive in my boot order in place of my first drive, to test the effect.

That fixed the hal.dll error for my second hard drive, but now I was getting the boot error for the backup partition on my first hard drive hal.dll.

So there is nothing wrong with any of the partitions, but I cant figure out how to fix this boot problem.

The thing is, this did not occur the last time I I did the same type a backup & recovery. Everything worked fine.

Could it have anything to do with recovering both the system files "and" the master boot record?

Is it necessary to recover the master boot record, & what effect does that have?