I never had an issue like this before. I'm working on a relative's laptop and they wanted it to just be wiped and a clean install of XP. Easy enough.
I reinstalled XP, ran the updates, put on AV and gave it back. The next day, she called to say that when she turned it on it gave her an error about an invalid partition table. After troubleshooting a bit, I decided to just do a reinstall of XP.
After that reinstall, when I boot up the laptop, it's asking me which OS I want to boot up and they're both Windows XP. It's like it's dual booting XP. It was a default setting to wait 30 seconds and I changed it to 3 seconds so that they wouldn't notice. However, when I gave it back to her, she booted it up and now gets the error:
"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll."
What is going on? I've never had so many problems reinstalling XP.
I reinstalled XP, ran the updates, put on AV and gave it back. The next day, she called to say that when she turned it on it gave her an error about an invalid partition table. After troubleshooting a bit, I decided to just do a reinstall of XP.
After that reinstall, when I boot up the laptop, it's asking me which OS I want to boot up and they're both Windows XP. It's like it's dual booting XP. It was a default setting to wait 30 seconds and I changed it to 3 seconds so that they wouldn't notice. However, when I gave it back to her, she booted it up and now gets the error:
"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll."
What is going on? I've never had so many problems reinstalling XP.