Upgrading to Fedora 11 on Thinkpad T60

After upgrading from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11 on my Thinkpad (Lenovo) T60, I was unable to boot to Windows. Fedora 11, though, worked fine.

The error I got was:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:  \System32\hal.dll
Please re-intall a copy of the above file.

I was away at a conference, so I did not have access to a Windows XP disk. Luckily, one of the giveaways was a USB flash drive. Also, luckily, I brought another laptop that had Windows on it. I downloaded usbrecoveryconsole.zip from Tuts4Tech and followed the directions.

After booting to the USB, I pressed 'R' for the Recovery Console. I ran "fixboot c:". After rebooting, the Windows error was still there.

I tried changing "rootnoverify(hd0,2)" in grub.conf, but that didn't work either.

I booted back into the Recovery Console and ran DISKPART, which gave me:

F: Partition 1
-:  Partition 2
C: Partition 3 [NTFS]

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

On Fedora 11, I was able to mount the Windows Partition under the "Places" menu (root password required). I located the boot.ini file and changed "partition(2)" to "partition(3)"

Voila! Windows XP was able to boot again.

Last changed: Feb 27 2020 at 4:14 PM