hal.dll not found- wrong partition table or beyond certain boundary?

[ilko_t]

Doing some tests and tried to install XP SP3 to the fourth primary partition of the only internal disk. Boot.ini on internal drive does get the correct partition(4), but if I start the GUI part hal.dll error occurs.

Tried installing on partition 3 and everything went smoothly.

Is this wrong partition table or rather NTLDR cannot access windows directory and files on the fourth partition, since it's beyond certain boundary, or maybe BIOS matters

NTLDR/NTDETECT.COM are from XP SP3.

Could this reveal the cause of those reports with weird hal.dll errors, where partition entry did match?

MBR_HardDisk0.zip

[jaclaz]

Hmmm.

Nothing better to do than looking for troubles?

39 Mb + 47.53 Gb + 95.64 Gb = ÷ 143.56 Gb > 128 GiB or approximately 137.4 GB

Hard disk barrier:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/sizeGB128-c.html

LBA48:

http://www.48bitlba.com/

Most probably NTLDR has still 28 bit LBA.

Overall support for "NT family" was introduced in Windows Service Pack 3 / Windows XP Service Pack 1:

http://www.48bitlba.com/enablebiglba.htm

I don't think that besides fixing the driver and putting the setting for EnableBigLba in the Registry they updated significantly the NTLDR.

Possibly BOOTMGR has not such a limitation.

jaclaz

[ilko_t]

Thanks for the links, a lot to be read as usual

Or BIOS is buggy or not supporting 48LBA?

It's a Dell laptop, made end of 2005, the original disk was 60GB, now is 160GB.

BIOS do not display hard disk size, nor I could find a program, which can detect if BIOS supports 48LBA, apart from the paid HDinfo. Any hints how to check that?

A couple of interesting links:

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/959

http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archive/...the-second.aspx

The “Multi” syntax instructs Windows to rely on the system BIOS to load system files. This means that NTLDR will be using INT13 BIOS calls to find and load NTOSKRNL and any other files on the boot partition.

....

The “SCSI” syntax tells Windows to load a SCSI device driver to access the boot partition. A copy of the driver must be renamed to NTBOOTDD.SYS and placed in the root of the system partition.