i grabbed a handy xubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386 cd, started the install only to reduce ntfs from 190gb to 160gb, installed <a href="http://xp.pro" target="_blank">xp.pro</a> in the resulting 28gb free space, which boots fine, but on next boot of the original now 160gb xp.home-edition it ran a fsck sort of operation during bootup, and on next boot is now unbootable, complaining system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupt. google wisdom mostly recommends running repair mode from the xp cd, well my xp cd offers to install but doesn't offer any repair option, anyway i found testdisk-6.12 which probably did as much as fixboot would have, checked that the partition boot sector matched the backup, regenerated it from scratch anyway, boot.ini is fine, substituting a hal.dll from <a href="http://xp.pro" target="_blank">xp.pro</a> doesn't help, possibly a new hal.dll from xp.home-edition might work but my bet is that ntfsresize didn't do the right thing with a disk that i'm guessing has a guid partition table. any help or ideas anyone?<br>