hey,

im a to the whole linux thing, so i was wonering if anyone would be able to help me with this problem i have.

i have installed the operating systems in this order:
Me, Xp, linux(redhat9.0)

I can dual boot into Me, but not Xp.
After installation of redhat9.0 i am not able to boot into Xp,
I get an error message that says "Windows XP could not load: The file hal.dll (windows/system32/) is missing or corrupt. Please reinstall.

i have tryed replacing the hal.dll file, but it still doesnt work.

I installed the boot loader: grub
with the GUI: gnome

my partitions are: c: winme (fat32) [2gb], d: winxp (ntfs) [4gb], e: redhat (fat32 - ext3)[4gb]

my friend asked me what the boot device was i the bios, to try an help but unfortunately i an doing this on a school computer for an assignment in which the computers bios is locked.

the booting is tri boot:
we first start up, the grub has us choose btw 2 linux links, which i think goes to the same place, then dos option. once you pick the dos option, you either go into me or xp.

What can i do to fix this problem?

Thanks.

~Lindsay

Let's get to grips with grub first then you may be able to figure out whether your configuration is correct or not;

title Windows 95/98/NT/2000
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

title Linux
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 ro

You see in the above example that to boot M$ the system is intructed to look at (hd0,0). Lets examine this.
hd obviously stands for hard drive. Grub numbers the drives and partitions from zero so the interpretation of this is to look at hard drive 1, partition 1 and in the second example for the Linux system to go to hard drive 1 and partition 2 and find vmlinuz in the root directory. The Linux numbering system labels drives in alpha format and the partitions in numeric format from 1. The latter case /dev/hda2 = device hard drive 1 and partition 2.
If the parameters in the grub menu are correct and the os still won't boot then suspect that something has gone wrong with the os (surprise, surprise, it can only be M$) and you will probably have to do a system recovery which will probably result in grub being deleted. You would then have to boot the Linux system off your install cd and re-install grub.