Image restore from TI hal.dll corrupt or not found?

I've been playing around with TI, making an image of xp and trying to restore it to another HD and then booting from that HD.

1st, I've cloned my HD to another HD and it boots ok, and everything appears normal. 2) I've made 3 images of the complete C drive (OS) to a different clean partition of a secondary HD with the TI boot disk. I then removed the primary HD, installed the secondary as the primary, then booted from the TI disk and then reinstalled the image to the C drive. All 3 times on boot I come up with <windows root> system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupt. (it appears to be corrupt, not missing). The size of the hal.dll file under system 32 is different from the original C drive to the restored image drive.​

I then tried copy/paste the hal.dll file from original system32 folder to the restored image system32 folder (after deleting the hal.dll file) and that didn't work. I've tried to boot from the windows xp disk to get to the recovery console to restore the hal.dll file, to the C drive created image, but it won't boot and only returns a black monitor screen (after pressing any key to boot from the windows CD.) ​

btw, I know this install of TI works because last week, I made a C drive image and successfully restored it to another hard drive). also, My Hal.dll file is listed like this HALL.DLL and all the other system32 files are in small letters. (I don't know if this make a difference?--My hall.dll file is not a folder just a stand alone file under system32). any ideas, why the hal.dll file is corrupt from the image? Also, since I've cloned the OS to a BU HD, do you think perhaps I should try to reinstall the hal.dll file from the windows xp disk to my original drive before making an image? It's just strange that all 3 times (2 and 3 after each failure) the size of the hal.dll file is different from the original hal.dll file in the system32 folder. thx​

 

jrx10,

It's a false error message. There is nothing wrong with your hal.dll. Windows just can't find it.

How many partitions were on your original HD? How many are on the new HD? What is the partition order? Can you access the original boot.ini and post it here.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=130

 

Thx, for the link, I've copied it to my acronis folder for reading when I get the time. btw, I had a &^lluva time with the HD partition associations between xp and TI. I finally had to put a folder at the top of each C drive labeled "this is the good OS C" "and this is the bad OS C". The partition labels was all screwed between xp my computer/ (& HD management console) and the TI boot. Also I tried to manually set the partitions and it got to be a pain, so I just left it on auto, since the HDs were 2 different sizes and I was going to reinstall the fresh image of the clean install back to the temporary one anyway. Hopefully this will correct the problem. Also, is there anyway to clone a single partition (active with OS) to another single partition in a new drive (active & same size) with TI, and not clone the whole HD? thx

 

You can do this with the image/restore method. Not with TI cloning. It can be done as a clone with Partition Magic and I assume Acronis DDS.

 

Your partition name should include your drive letter. This helps immensely. When booting from the Acronis Rescue CD, it will often see the drives letters differently than Windows. Your only means of true identification is the unique name you assign. The name must be such that there can be no misunderstanding. Often times, you are not permitted to access the drive to check folder names.

Perhaps my unique drive names link below will offer additional help.

 

Hello jrx10,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please make sure you use the latest build of Acronis True Image. To get access to updates you should first register your software.

Please take a look at this article for some instructions on transferring your operating system to another hard drive.

Please also see this article regarding some precautions for transferring system to another drive.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov