Dual Boot Restore Won't Boot!
Hello,
This is specific to Trueimage 10 but probably has other applications. The system is as follows:
Disk 0 - Windows 2K installed first
Disk 1 - Windows XP installed later
When XP was installed it correctly detected the 2K OS and asked If I wanted dual boot and I said yes. Dual boot worked fine until... I needed to restore the XP partition to get rid of some sound card software installation gone terribly bad.
I restored the partition the first time letting TI default the partition type to logical because it said that that was the original type... Wrong! I tried to boot in this state but Windows XP obviously couldn't find itself. Looking at the TI display it showed a data partition on the same drive as Pri, Act. I don't know if this caused any damage or not but am listing it just in case.
I deleted the partition and started over. This time it was restored as Pri, Act. The restore appears to have worked as all files are visible in Win 2K however, it refuses to boot XP. The error message is that it can't find \System32\hal.dll. I checked and the file is there.
It appears that Windows 2K boot manager has gotten confused by something that TI either didn't backup or restore properly. I am sure that this has come up before. Does anyone know how to fix this? I am assuming that it can be done using the internal Windows boot manager and not adding another product.
Thanks,
Steve
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Pat L wrote:If you have correctly restored the partitions, you could repair your computer startup with the recovery console, and use the bootrec command http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392
Well, not quite... This is XP and not 7. Bootrec is for Win 7 only.
Upon further inspection I found that True Image in another incident of stupidity decided to modify the Boot.ini file on the OTHER physical drive (0) to point to an invalid boot partition on drive 1 which had the XP partition on it. The windows message about HAL.DLL being missing or damaged is also bogus. It's there but the boot loader just isn't looking in the right place for it.
There are at least two ways to fix this:
1. Find your distribution CD and boot into the repair console. From there run Bootcfg.exe with the proper arguments to rebuild the boot.ini file.
2. Since this is a dual boot system boot into the working system and use a text editor to carefully change only the partition number to the correct one.
Thanks,
Steve
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