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Stray Dog Joined: 13 Jul 2007 Posts: 8

At the moment I have two hard disks that I swap in and out of the one laptop ( Toshiba Tecra A2). Both have an XP professional image, one is mine that came with the laptop ( Toshiba only supply a recovery CD not a full XP disk) and the other is from my work laptop ( so I don't know the Administrator password).

I'd like to be able to use dualboot to choose at boot time which XP to use rather than swapping the disks out all the time. I've used Norton Ghost to copy the partions over to a new bigger hard drive.

I've tried using my work XP as the 1st partion and the Toshiba image in the first position also, but although the dual boot menu displays whichever one is the second choice XP fails to start with an error message like "Winnt_root\system32\Hal.dll missing or corrupt.

Boot.ini below.

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

I suspect (but what do I know) that its because both images are used to being in the first partion of their own hard disk.

Can I achieve my goal ?
Do I need a comercial boot loading software ?( used to use Boot Magic from Powerquest Partition magic before to swap between 95 and 9 Cool

.

I can get my hand on a copy of XP professional if I need to enter the recovery console if required.

I've tried to search for hal.dll errors but the solutions seemto point to genuine corruption or no default in the boot.ini file.

Any help gratefully received.

Tony