I have been trying furiously for hours to try to get my OpenSUSE 11.1 and Windows XP to play nice together. Here is what I have done:

I partitioned my computer using GParted in the following manner:
1-Windows XP NTFS
2-Linux Swap Partition
3-OpenSUSE Partition ext3

Second, I restored an image created with Norton Ghost 2003 to the NTFS partition. I restarted the computer, and I believe I got an error message that said something like "Could not find hal.dll." I ignored the message assuming that this was the computers way of telling me that the boot sector file became corrupt due to having multiple partitions.

Then I went on to install OpenSUSE onto the ext3 partition. The installation went very smooth. OpenSUSE booted fine also. I now have a GRUB boot selector with three choices; OpenSUSE, OpenSUSE (some kind of failsafe), and Windows.

I select Windows, and it fails to boot. So I try one more thing:

I boot up my Ghost restore CD and restore the Windows partition once more. I reboot it, making sure to select windows from the GRUB bootloader menu, and Windows fails to boot again. I reboot the computer and select OpenSUSE, and it boots just fine.

What have I done wrong?

can you boot to a windows utility like bartsPE? Can you see your Windows?

hal.dll is the hardware abstratcion layer. you really need it with windows. you maybe able to get a new one. I can explain how to later...

also can you post your /boot/grub/menu.lst
for us?

Thanks

Did you have enough space on your Windows partition? It sounds as if, for some reason, not everything got copied...maybe the source for your windows copy was incomplete in some way.

Did you Google your error? I'm guessing #4 will pull you out of this one. I recently had this error, but for me it was because I restored my image to another drive rather than the first one set to boot in the bios, I had to set my boot manager to remap it (swap drives) so Windows was tricked into thinking it was back on the first drive.