I read a lot of the threads about this issue (it came up when I tried to boot into my bootcamp partition, which failed with the error in the title), but none of them directly solved my issue. Here's what I did: I happened to have another bootcamp backup on a separate HD, so I copied the "hal.dll" file to my new bootcamp partition (into the WINDOWS\system32 directory, after making a backup of the corrupt one). The old (working) hal.dll file is 136kb, and the one I replaced (installed by parallels?) is only 104kb. I have a FAT32 partition, so I was able to do it from within OS X. I also copied over the working boot.ini file: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect Now I can boot normally into the bootcamp partition and using parallels. The only issue I still have is that every time I boot up using parallels, I get the message, "Warning: Parallels Tools Setup in Progress...", which goes away after Windows loads. -Tofer
