Okay, so that's basically the only thing I need to do right now. Long story short, the MBR/partitions on my laptop are now "funky", and Windows is complaining that HAL.DLL is corrupted or missing (which it isn't). What's new.
The problem, and the irony, are that I was trying to resize my partitions and free up the 4GB of recovery crap Acer sets in a tiny partition before the WinXP partition, and that seems to be the solution to this. My friend has a copy of that on disc so I'll try using it on Monday, but is there any quick fix to this?
The obvious solution would be to boot a WinXP CD and run the recovery console--well guess what, it freezes at "Windows is starting Setup...", after all the friggin drivers are loaded.
Note that I only need to fix the boot record so Windows will stop bitching and load properly. PartitionMagic didn't touch the WinXP partition (which happens to be FAT32). I need a solution that DOES NOT INVOLVE LOADING WINDOWS OR A WINDOWS SETUP CD. On another note, I may install *NIX on this at a later time. Now is NOT that time for much of the hardware in that laptop is still unsupported, namely the wireless and graphics cards.
I hope someone can come up with an idea... :cry2:
The problem, and the irony, are that I was trying to resize my partitions and free up the 4GB of recovery crap Acer sets in a tiny partition before the WinXP partition, and that seems to be the solution to this. My friend has a copy of that on disc so I'll try using it on Monday, but is there any quick fix to this?
The obvious solution would be to boot a WinXP CD and run the recovery console--well guess what, it freezes at "Windows is starting Setup...", after all the friggin drivers are loaded.
Note that I only need to fix the boot record so Windows will stop bitching and load properly. PartitionMagic didn't touch the WinXP partition (which happens to be FAT32). I need a solution that DOES NOT INVOLVE LOADING WINDOWS OR A WINDOWS SETUP CD. On another note, I may install *NIX on this at a later time. Now is NOT that time for much of the hardware in that laptop is still unsupported, namely the wireless and graphics cards.
I hope someone can come up with an idea... :cry2: