I was messing with partition magic and converted one of my logical drives to “primary,” (no O/S installed) but it wasn’t set to active. My pc multiboots to WinXP, Win2K and Linux. Then when I reboot and chose WinXP, I get the following error:
“Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
Please re-install a copy of the above file”
Now I have the XP CD but didn’t want to use it at first because I think I just messed up with the boot order or something. So I reboot again and this time I chose Win2K, and I was able to get in.
So I guess my question is since I’m in, how do I fix WinXP so I can boot to WinXP? Should I run partition magic again and undo the changes I made (i.e. revert back the newly “primary” disk to “logical” which was originally set to logical)
I hope I’m making sense, but please help me!!
THANK YOU COLIN AND THE BLEACH GUY!! 
yes i undid the changes!! i'm not gunna mess with partition amgic again lol (best answer, i'm goin to have to do eeny meeny mini mo between you two!!)
also thanks for blood lust for the extra info
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3 responses so far ↓
1 Colinc // Sep 11, 2008
You MUST undo these changes. NEVER play with things you do not understand, there are other changes you could have made which would not even let you in at all, and others could make your disk unreadable.
2 ^^{31337} // Sep 11, 2008
Yes revert it, You can only have 4 primary partitions and converting a logical to primary will break the chain.
HAL.dll = Hardware Abstraction Layer, thus the file it needs to read your windows partition.
The ring0 chain was broken.
3 bloodluszt // Sep 11, 2008
It usually more than likely your ini file and not your hal.dll
From the MS-DOS “C:\>” prompt check to see if your computer has the “hal.dll” file by typing “dir hal.dll /s” at the prompt. If the computer returns a “File not found” message, the hal.dll has been deleted.
To recover this file -boot the Windows operating system CD and choose the option to “Restore”, “Repair”, or “Recover.” This option will prompt you for the Windows installation to use, the administrators password and will allow you to restore the proper file. At the MS-DOS prompt type the below command.
expand x:\i386\hal.dl_ y:\windows\system32\
In the above example “x” would be the letter of your CD-ROM drive and “y” the letter of the drive your operating system is installed on. For example, your disc drive may be D: and your hard drive is likely C:.
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