although I must say that Old-Polack's way of giving you step-by-step instructions is easier to follow.
(The video link gives you so much information in so short a time that most people won't be able to remember half of it.)
Also blackbird, the disk I have is of XP Pro and the version on the laptop is XP Home. I've tried it but at some point it warned me that I could lose the rest of the partitions, i.e. PCL. Anyhow, I'll go back to the video and see if I can work something out. Thanks for your assistance.
As long as you are just running the recovery console, to expand the hal.dl_, and doing the boot.ini replacement, it shouldn't make any difference.
That's a pretty good video. The part about the boot.ini makes sense, as your Windows was on /dev/hda2, and now is on /dev/hda1, it's probably looking for the boot files in the wrong place. That's probably why it warns about the partitions too. You can edit the boot.ini with Windows notepad, if you could only get Window running.
I used to multi-boot Windows, so if one failed, I could fix it from a running one, same as I do now with multi-booting Linux.
You can do it with
kate also, but it would need to be done with Windows/DOS line ends. (Line ends are coded differently in Windows, than they are in Linux.) If you open the file with kate, under
Tools --> End of Line check
Windows/DOS. You could try that to see if it shows being on partition 2, and if so change the 2 to a 1, then save the file, and try to boot Windows again. It may not actually need a new HAL.DLL. What's the worst that could happen? You'd have to do it again, from the recovery console, as shown in the video.
If you mounted the Windows partition, you could use
cat to see the contents of boot.ini, without actually opening it in a text editor. At least you'd know whether it needed to be edited or not.
Worst case, under the circumstances, would be to do it as in the video, along with the fixboot. Watch the video a few times, and take detailed notes, if it comes to that.
