I’m in BIG trouble! My computer won’t boot.
Some background: I have two partitions, a Win 7 (the default) and an XP. When Windows tries to launch, I get the old “the System32/hal.dll file is missing or corrupted.” The problem is, when I try to boot from my partition software’s boot disc (that I had made when I first installed the software), it says the “boot.ini or boot.mgr is missing.” Then, if I try to boot from my Windows install disc, neither windows installation is visible, so I can’t do a repair that way.
The night before this happened, I installed SP3 to the XP partition. Also, I was getting low on disc space – down to about 3 GB. It did in fact occur to me that I might be making a bad move by installing SP3 when my drive space was getting so low.
Any help or guidance will be immensely appreciated. Please be patient with me – I might not have a chance to get back here until tomorrow afternoon. Thanks!