At 10:06 PM -0500 4/3/05, Robert Nicholson wrote: >So I had to reboot my machine because everything locked up and low and behold. > >Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt ><Windows root>\system32\hal.dll. >Please re-install a copy of the above file. > >Nice one. I bought the Pro upgrade to Office 2004, just so I could get VPC7, as if not for it I'd have stayed with Office.X for the time being, and I feel totally cheated! I had several apps installed under WinXP, and was using it fairly heavily for handling some data (even under VPC, the tool I was using was faster than the Mac version). Anyway, I was moving the data around under XP getting everything cleaned up and ready to copy to the Mac side, and BOOM! XP blew up and crashed. When I rebooted, I ended up with a similar error, though I'm sure it was a different error message. That's when I discovered the first bit of fun, VPC doesn't ship with a standard XP Pro CD, so what XP expects you to do to recover you can't. I then when I did a new install and tried to mount my old XP disk image, I hit the really fun part, the old disk image was so hopelessly corrupt that I was unable to recover any of my data. As near as I can figure out, it let me move all the little files around as much as I wanted until it the WinFS became so corrupt that it couldn't do anything more, and that was when Windows had crashed on me. Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |