Reformat Problem <windows root> \systerm 32\hal.dll.

Hi, must be your lucky day?

Had the same problem yesteday, and solved it by:
- popping in the Windows CD again and boot from it
- once it reaches the choices where it says recovery, select recovery.
- it'll search for installations and presents a choice for the one you want to logon to
- Logon the one that's causing the problem (or the other one if you cannot get into it).
- type HELP to learn what you can do there
- type HELP BOOTCFG or BOOTCFG /? to see what that can to, and first do some of the non-invasive options, like listing the installations
- select BOOTCFG REBUILD (if I remember well), which presents you with options of Windows installations that you want to add to the bootmenu
- after this BOOTCFG rebuilds the boot.ini file.
Reboot

If this doesn't do the trick you could try using FIXBOOT also.This rewrites your bootrecord (whihc is fairly invasive)

If possible try saving waht can be saved to a backup, e.g. with Acronis/Ghost or something else that can still access the partitions.

In my case the combination of BOOTCFG and FIXBOOT sorted it out, but I afterwards I had to adjust the bootrecord for one of the other partitions with another operating system. This isn't a problem with tools like partitionmagic/Acronis (and others) but a bit more elaborate in Windows itself (probably because I simply don't know how to do it in Windows).

Hope this helps

Cheers