My Quest: Part 3

[apolloae]

Alright, this would be my third thread in my epic saga to get both Windows and OSX working. It's a fun learning process, that's for sure.

 

Alright. My current problem is:

 

I started by reformatting, starting on a clean slate. Then, I broke my HDD into 2 partitions (there is a third that is there for Dell Diagnostics materials), on the first I installed Windows. Next, I moved chain0 to the HD and edited boot.ini. After that, I installed OSX on the other partition. It then proceeded to boot OSX each time I tried to start the computer, so I reinstalled XP over the old XP installation in the first partition. This worked fine, I got back into Windows and all, and then I restarted my computer. I got the bootscreen (Yes! One step closer!) and clicked on Windows, and that worked nice n' dandy. Unfortunately, when I restarted my computer and clicked Mac OS X, I got an error saying that HAL.DLL was missing, and that I needed to reinstall that file. And here I am, confused as I try to read all the other posts regarding this .dll. So, I come back to the smart ones who know how to fix it.

 

To let you know, I am installing XP and OSX v.10.4.3.

 

Also, I will list my tries at fixing it before I came here...

 

a.) Using fdisk to change the active partition to OSX. Unfortunately I load fdisk, and it only sees 2 partitions, one massive one that is both the MacOSX and the XP partitions combined, and the one for Dell Diagnostics. This got me nowhere.

 

b.) I used the XP disk to try repairing and using "fixboot" and "fixmbr". This was to no avail; the two commands did nothing to fix it.

 

c.) (I honestly don't know how this one would help, but I tried it anyway) I read that I should set the active disk to Windows through the Startup Disk in the OSX setup. I looked there, but it didn't recognize any XP OSs on the system (but it does recognize OSX on my system, even though I can't get into that one, but can get into Windows just fine.

 

Does anyone have some helpful hints? Thanks.

[apolloae]

Also: My Windows partition is D:/ and I had originally had my boot.ini pointing to D:\chain0, then I checked the FAQ and it should be pointing to C:\chain0...after I changed this it still unfortunately does not work.

 

EDIT: I had an epiphany and thought since I have a C drive (my Dell diagnositics drive) I'd put the chain0 file in there, but that gave me a blinking cursor when I tried to load it. No error this time, but I still cant get in...

 

EDIT2: I have seen numerous posts that say that if OSX is on your third partition, it will not work. So, I'm starting again and putting XP on the third partition and OSX on the second. Hopefully this will work; if it does, then I may write a long, detailed guide on how to set up XP/OSX from a formatted HDD.