Thank you all who replied!
Ok, finally got it to boot. I gave up and threw it in a corner for a long time : )
(so long infact i forgot i post here originally, and accidentally came across my own thread lol)
What didn’t work:(on its own)
-Changing boot.ini to any valid partition - when set to the real partition, windows would start to boot up until Mup.sys, where it would kernel crash and auto reboot too fast to see.
-Copying a clean** hal.dll** from windows/servicepackfiles/i386/hal.dll to system32/hal.dll (note: a checksum showed the files were different, regardless, didnt work on its own)
-After finding a micro XP recovery CD image (7mb, can’t find the article it came from anymore, was on a microsoft answers page, but i’m putting it on dropbox for anyone else) followed others directions:
Attrib -H -R -S C:\Boot.ini
DEL C:\Boot.ini
BootCfg /Rebuild
Fixboot
(verbatim)
So, ** Attrib -R C:\boot.ini was the only flag that worked, -H & -S failed (-R **makes file writeable)
BootCfg /Rebuild failed, recovery couldn’t recognize the system. Chkdsk /r (repair) chugged away with no real errors, took about 1.5 hrs.
Fixboot C: ran with no errors.
I wanted to start with what didnt work, so you could see how i got to what ended up working
What worked (somehow):
When i deleted boot.ini,* bootcfg /rebuild* failed, so did bootcfg /add, so it never replaced the boot.ini…which seems to have been a good thing!!
Upon reboot, i saw a quick error about no boot.ini, which windows unhappily showed the safe-mode menu. i selected safe-mode + command prompt. It started to load, and slowed down again on Mup.sys. I swore a couple times, BUT IT DIDN’T REBOOT! it spent the next 30 minutes what i can only imagine as figuring its **** out, started identifying many drivers i used to have working fine. A reboot later, i can load windows in Normal.
Anyone with this hal issue, make a backup of your boot.ini and try deleting the original, boot and see if windows did what it did for me.
Because i tried a few things, including the Chkdsk repair (which on its own also didnt work), i can’t narrow it down to say, 1 specific action worked, but some combination of the above worked. Good luck! Btw, this process didn’t destroy GRUB, which still shows and boots opensuse, and windows (now)
**HP Pavilion Laptop: **For People who have a problem loading the XP recovery disk, where it won’t even boot into recovery because it can’t find a windows system, Open your BIOS, try disabling SATA support. This worked on my laptop (i recently recalled previous windows woes, it wouldn’t install to MY SATA DRIVE, while sata support was enabled…lol your guess is as good as mine, but it works)
XP Repair CD Image - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/57525189/xp_rec_con.iso (7MB - should this link die, email peter.rippe@gmail.com i’ll try to put it back up, but please someone else share it too!)- boot the CD, select Recovery, you’ll need to remember your admin password. Selecting Install won’t work. Don’t remember your password? Find OPHCRACK cd image, helps get access to/crack windows passwords (if you have the encrypted password, there are websites with lookup tables that can translate your password (if its not too hard))