Guess the clue is the hal problem which I presume has been resolved. That incident presumably happened because the system got confused about the hardware setup.
'Check for proper boot order in BIOS. You might see the hal.dll error if the boot order in BIOS is first looking at a hard drive other than your main hard drive.'
Maybe reflash the bios for a bit of excitement ?
The following shows an equivalent problem in Vista, to which the answer is:
'
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.'
The disk drive numbers may not correspond as expected to the SATA channel numbers when you set up Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, or Windows 7 on a computer that has multiple SATA or RAID disks
Looks common enough
Resolve HAL.dll Missing or Corrupt Error on Windows XP at Instant Registry Fixes
But as this says
[/QUOTE]
But as long as you have it straight in your mind which is which, I wouldn't change things--unless you are obsessive enough that you will lay in bed thinking about it.[/QUOTE]
