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.'
- yes, resolved - see post #1
Maybe reflash the bios for a bit of excitement ?
- don't think so, since it is working now, albeit unexpectedly! I prefer a different sort 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
- see post #7 from SD - he also had an XP link.
The problem is NOT with the 'C' Drive.
Resolve HAL.dll Missing or Corrupt Error on Windows XP at Instant Registry Fixes
- even bootcfg could not cope! See post #1
One of Windows little 'mysteries', I guess. It definitely stems from the 'power outage' taking two drives 'out' of the system but why the system has not 'caught up' as a whole I know not.