OK, I just got a new Sony Vaio Notebook PCG FRV37 that has Windows XP on it. I have been wanting to try Linux for a long time but last time I tried I ran into incompatiblity problems with my nic. But with my laptop I am getting a new nic, so it hopefully will be compatible. So I downloaded and installed Mandrake 9.2 on the laptop. The laptop originally had 2 ntfs partitions and one wierd invisible one for the restore stuff. So I repartitioned things, but didn't touch the partition with Windows installed on it. It booted perfect into Mandrake. But when I tried to boot into Windows it said that hal.dll was missing or corrupted and wouldn't boot. What happened? I found that I couldn't replace the hal.dll through mandrake because it couldn't write to the partition. Should I just try reinstalling Mandrake(I restored it to factory condition)?

Years ago manufactures to save money on cmos memory used to store bois info in a partition. These days manufacturers such as sony, dell, etc. are not giving you an OEM copy as such in prior windows releases. What they give now is like hp's restore disks back in the days of win9x. These manufacturers customize their copies of xp for hardware and such. I wouldn't be surprised if your manufacturer did something to customize XP where that partition is needed.

From your post I am assuming you deleted it. That is why I am bringing this up. If this is the case I would try getting a plain jane copy of XP (retail or such) or restore the partition. Hope this helps.

ahh... I see. I did restore it. And XP works now. I will try again without deleting that partition.

Here is a simple solution.I think Lilo change partition order..
You have to try change partition number in boot.ini file...
.
.
.

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

Um, can Mandrake read and write to NTFS partitions?

I tried reinstalling both XP and Mandrake, and it worked when I didn't delete the restore partition.

Linux can read NTFS partitions, but cannot write to them. At least not reliably.

OK, thanks for the info. I did get Mandrake working by not deleting that restore partition.