HAL.DLL BOOT.INI AND WINDOWS 7?

[SirCyber]

oh the joys of microsoft... it is the bread and butter of computer repair shops worldwide. so, you can guess what this is about. a shipmate came up with the lovely invalid boot.ini damaged or missing hal.dll error. conventional means have failed me as I unknowingly prescribed to him to just install windows 7. well, that didn't work, obviously. I ran bootcfg/rebuild in command prompt, and I got an ssrts.dll error. and, finally, when I tried to fix that, it said that the file was not on the hard drive. am I right now to the point where doing a full system format utilizing third party software is my only answer? help!

 

[KSoD]

Well i can say that boot.ini is a XP Problem. It is in no way related to Win7 or even Vista as they dont use the boot.ini anymore. They use the BCD now.

So have you tried to copy the hal.dll from the XP CD to the PC? Have you tried the fixboot and fixmbr commands from teh Recovery Console of XP?

 

[SirCyber]

don't have access to an XP disk, and I don't know how far he's gotten with the 7 install

****EDIT****
If he's gotten far enough with the 7 install, would it have overwritten the boot.ini file?

 

[KSoD]

It depends. If he formatted the old OS off the drive then yes. If he jsut went with a install and has it setup for dual booting then it gets tricky.

The BCD should overwrite the error if the install process gets far enough. But selecting XP will continue to give him this error.

But the boot information is some of the last stuff installed in the process. It is done right before the restart when it continues the install of Win7.

 

[SirCyber]

right now it's like it's trying to dual boot, but it can't because of the boot.ini file. it will not finish booting win7, but it won't let go of winxp

 

[KSoD]

What is the error for Win7? I knew XP wouldnt boot. As the errors are very specific for XP. Without fixing them then there is no way to get XP to boot.

 

[SirCyber]

ok so can I continue with the win7 install and keep his files? or will he have to get those again later? *he has comics and some other stuff, idk*

 

[KSoD]

If Win7 allows you to continue the install when selected yes. You can get his files from the old XP install.