dave8555
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Windows XP FAT32 will not boot. Gives hal.dll missing. Win/DOS platforms cannot read the disk.
Last night I used Partition Magic 8.0 to resize the clusters from 32kb to 16kb. All appeared to go well until I restarted the computer. I got a missing hall.dll error message and windows ceased booting. I am dual booting windows me and windows xp. ME is on the primary drive (c:\) and xp is D:\. Windows cannot read the disk. It reports the file system as RAW. DOS will not read the disk either. Scandisk and CHKDSK wont read it either. Linux can read the files and from what I used, most of the files are intact and fine. The filesystem is FAT32 and Linux reports this and reads the disk fine yet Windows will not. I think it may be the partition table. I unfortunatley have no back up of the files on the disk with xp and have no free space or burners to back them up. Is there some way to fix this? From what I have seen the files are fine. Would a corrupt partition table cause this issue? Is there a fix short of reformatting? I am open to using Windows, DOS, or Linux. Any ideas would help as I am desperate at this point. Note that the recovery console will not identify the drive and will not even ask to logon to a Windows installation. If i try to expand hal.dll i get an 'access is denied' error. FDISK sees the disk but does not know that it is FAT32. It reports the type as unknown.
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