Squeezing myself into another drive's mulitboot?

I'm finally getting around to assembling my new computer. I got it
free from someone and all I noticed, or was told, was that it didn't
have much memory so all I tthought about was buying 4 gig, building a
little ranch house, buying a few cattle, and settling down.

But today I noticed it still had a hard drive, 40gigs, and when I
turned it on, XP started. I wish I'd noticed this by last fall when
my XP self-destructed.

It loaded and ran for a couple minutes. It displayed My Computer, but
when I tried the second time, it crashed and on restart, I get the
message "Missing or corrupt.... root\system32\hal.dll Please
reinstall a copy....."

So I have two questions and the 2nd is much more important.

1) I have 2 or 3 backups of my XP Pro. Can I just copy that and use
a flashdrive and Hiren's to replace the bad one? Does it matter if
it's Home or Pro? Or is the harddrive failing, and I should clone the
drive quick, and then replace hal.dll?

2) Squeezing myself into another drive's mulitboot?

The computer used to have multiboot set up. The multi-boot screen
displays with one other named copy of XP on HDD 2, and two more named
partitions F and G on HDD2, which one can click on but it doesn't name
an OS -- And since that HDD2 is gone, nothing starts of course. But
I would love to have multiboot all set up already -- I hate setting
that up. It wears me out and I make mistakes -- and it seems to me
that I can put in a second drive, and put Win7 in one of its
partitions and then go back to the XP files and make the multiboot
screen file point to win7.

Still later I can clone the XP along with its multiboot setup to a
newer, bigger drive and replace the first drive with that.

Am I on the right track?

Micky wrote:

Hiren's

I would boot the Hiren's and use it to evaluate the integrity of the
pieces and parts of the hardware we are working with.

This is some kind of old stuff that we are trying to figure out how
useful it can be. You should find out the CPU, ram, hdd, video,
connectivity resources which are working.

I think it is a lot of fun to make the best of this kind of situation.

Win7

Am I on the right track?

I have some doubts about the hardware and Win7, but I shouldn't be too
gloomy about that until you come up with the integrity of the hardware
report.

I realize this is an XP group, but I would be thinking about a linux if
not/ as opposed to/ some kind of XP. The problem with XP is that it is
such an old OS with such limitations.

I think we have to match the times with the job with the existing
hardware with practicality.

I have had hardware like what this might be that I wouldn't be able to
give away to some service looking for computers for useful charitable
purposes.


--
Mike Easter

[Default] On Sun, 24 Jul 2016 19:23:33 -0700, in
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general Mike Easter
wrote:

Micky wrote:

Hiren's

I would boot the Hiren's and use it to evaluate the integrity of the
pieces and parts of the hardware we are working with.

Actually, I've installed 4gig in the new, memory-less computer, and
found that its HDD had a diagnostic partition, and everything checked
good except the CD drive which needed a CD in it to be checked, and
one other similar thing. Both of which are replaceable.

This is some kind of old stuff that we are trying to figure out how
useful it can be. You should find out the CPU, ram, hdd, video,
connectivity resources which are working.

I think it is a lot of fun to make the best of this kind of situation.

Me too.

Win7

Am I on the right track?

I have some doubts about the hardware and Win7, but I shouldn't be too
gloomy about that until you come up with the integrity of the hardware
report.

I ran a win7 compatibility program on a Dell that is older than this
one, with weaker specs, and it passed.

I realize this is an XP group, but I would be thinking about a linux if
not/ as opposed to/ some kind of XP. The problem with XP is that it is
such an old OS with such limitations.

A friend asked me, for his own specific reasons, to help him remove
Ubuntu and install 7 on his laptop, and in the process, I ended up
getting a copy of the Ubuntu installer. Another reason I'd like to
tag along on the already present multi-boot.

Any opinion on my original plan?

I think we have to match the times with the job with the existing
hardware with practicality.

I have had hardware like what this might be that I wouldn't be able to
give away to some service looking for computers for useful charitable
purposes.

Micky wrote:
Mike Easter wrote:

I would boot the Hiren's and use it to evaluate the integrity of
the pieces and parts of the hardware we are working with.

This is some kind of old stuff that we are trying to figure out
how useful it can be. You should find out the CPU, ram, hdd,
video, connectivity resources which are working.

I ran a win7 compatibility program on a Dell that is older than this
one, with weaker specs, and it passed.

Your experience with some other hardware is not particularly useful and
you haven't reported anything but the ram so far and that the oldish 40G
hdd works. What is the cpu and video? And which 4G ram?

Any opinion on my original plan?

When do we get the rest of the hardware info?


--
Mike Easter

Mike Easter wrote:
I would boot the Hiren's and use it to evaluate the integrity of the
pieces and parts of the hardware we are working with.

This is some kind of old stuff that we are trying to figure out how
useful it can be. You should find out the CPU, ram, hdd, video,
connectivity resources which are working.

I just booted a Hiren's and the miniXP doesn't do that good a job with
its device manager, but it has a portable SIW in the HBCD Programs
directory which can figure everything out.

The CPU info is named that, the vid can be found in the PCI section, not
the Video. Hiren's MiniXP does a lot of emulation.

--
Mike Easter

Micky wrote:
I ended up getting a copy of the Ubuntu installer.

What is the media situation with this 'copy'? Was it an .iso now
written to USB or optical which will boot?

Which Ub version or even better if you know the full name of the .iso it
came from.

If the Ub is bootable, then you can tell this computer's BIOS to boot
from the USB or optical, unless your optical is just a CD and the Ub is
on a DVD.

With a live Ub booted, you have another way to evaluate what you can do
with this hardware.

What resources do you have to work on restoring this computer? You are
posting here so you have another working computer. Depending on which
Ub that is, it might not be the best choice and you should make another one.

But I would love to have multiboot all set up already

No; you are better off creating your own multiboot from scratch, not
trying to squeeze or shoehorn anything.

A popular strategy on hardware such as this is putting XP on the first
part followed by putting a linux on the next part and using the linux
installation steps to write a linux boot manager to the first part of
the disk.

An alternate strategy for some people who are much more partial to
windows than linux is to NOT let linux control the boot management, but
instead to use such as Easy BCD from Windows to write and control the
boot management.

--
Mike Easter

[Default] On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 08:26:37 -0700, in
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general Mike Easter
wrote:

Mike Easter wrote:
I would boot the Hiren's and use it to evaluate the integrity of the
pieces and parts of the hardware we are working with.

This is some kind of old stuff that we are trying to figure out how
useful it can be. You should find out the CPU, ram, hdd, video,
connectivity resources which are working.

I just booted a Hiren's and the miniXP doesn't do that good a job with
its device manager, but it has a portable SIW in the HBCD Programs
directory which can figure everything out.

The CPU info is named that, the vid can be found in the PCI section, not
the Video. Hiren's MiniXP does a lot of emulation.

I'll take a look

[Default] On Sun, 24 Jul 2016 21:02:35 -0400, in
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general Micky
wrote:

I'm finally getting around to assembling my new computer. I got it
free from someone and all I noticed, or was told, was that it didn't
have much memory so all I tthought about was buying 4 gig, building a
little ranch house, buying a few cattle, and settling down.

But today I noticed it still had a hard drive, 40gigs, and when I
turned it on, XP started. I wish I'd noticed this by last fall when
my XP self-destructed.

It loaded and ran for a couple minutes. It displayed My Computer, but
when I tried the second time, it crashed and on restart, I get the
message "Missing or corrupt.... root\system32\hal.dll Please
reinstall a copy....."

So I have two questions and the 2nd is much more important.

1) I have 2 or 3 backups of my XP Pro. Can I just copy that and use
a flashdrive and Hiren's to replace the bad one? Does it matter if
it's Home or Pro? Or is the harddrive failing, and I should clone the
drive quick, and then replace hal.dll?

The answer to this turned out to be that the hard drive was failing.

I only ran XP for under 10 minutes, then I coudln't start it again,
and when I used Hiren's or put the drive in a blacx dock, it said it
had to be formatted!!

This must have been the orginal 40gig drive because it has that
diagnostiic partition, which I ran once and it said everything was
good, except the CD drives it couldn't test.

And it had a tiny partition that might be where the multiboot stuff
was.

For the sake of learning, I'm going to try to save these two
funcitoning partitions and I thought I was goint go try to restore the
bad one, but it seemed the partition recovery software, like from
EaseUs just wants to copy sections it can find, and iiuc it would be
worth it to retrieve data, but not just for the heck of it. ??

Before the owner gave me the box, she must have taken out the memory
beause there was only one 256Meg SIMM in it. The box is old but it's
not that old.

Now I've put in 4 gig and after some effort, today I did get win7
running and connected to the internet.

2) Squeezing myself into another drive's mulitboot?

The computer used to have multiboot set up. The multi-boot screen
displays with one other named copy of XP on HDD 2, and two more named
partitions F and G on HDD2, which one can click on but it doesn't name
an OS -- And since that HDD2 is gone, nothing starts of course. But
I would love to have multiboot all set up already -- I hate setting
that up. It wears me out and I make mistakes -- and it seems to me
that I can put in a second drive, and put Win7 in one of its
partitions and then go back to the XP files and make the multiboot
screen file point to win7.

Still later I can clone the XP along with its multiboot setup to a
newer, bigger drive and replace the first drive with that.

Am I on the right track?