Yes, it's the ever-delightful missing hal.dll file error which prevents me from booting into Boot Camp. I've read about it in a few threads here, none of which has captured my particular dilemma. Recent upgrades to Parallels Desktop 3.0 killed my ability to boot Windows XP SP 3 under Boot Camp. This installation of WinXP was originally installed on a Boot Camp partition that I later told Parallels to use as a VM. After sorting the multiple-hardware-configurations trick to boot in either situation without having to re-authorize Windows, I was able to boot in either Boot Camp or Parallels using that partition as a VM. This worked until the last couple of updates. The first time I tried applying what I believe was the second to last update for Parallels 3.0 I ran into an issue where my XP graphics display went all wonky after waking up my MacBook Pro from sleeping. Guidance here gave me instructions on how to mend the Mac and re-install Parallels, which I did. It was after that I noticed I couldn't boot under Boot Camp any more. I had this problem prior to the latest update. I've read articles here and on other sites about using Windows Recovery Console to correct this, which is where my tale diverges from others. I can't get the recovery console to run because my administrator password is not accepted. I changed the password to something very simple with no special characters and tried again. No dice. So, I can't run the recovery console to try and correct this error. Which, from other threads here, doesn't sound like that would guarantee success as it may not really be the hal.dll file that's at fault. Piecing it together from Microsoft KB articles, it sounds like somehow Sysprep was part of the equation (though I've never run it) and that's effectively "broken" the encryption of my password as far as Recovery Console is concerned. Microsoft lists a hot fix that (for some reason) I have to ask them for. Here's where I run into questions: How am I supposed to apply that hot fix? Is it only going to be applied to my Parallels hardware profile? Will it have any impact on my Boot Camp partition? Will the fix even appear there? Is this something I can do on a virtual machine that won't load web pages? (I've got another post here on that topic in a separate thread) Any advice or guidance on the topic is appreciated. My host machine is a MacBook Pro, 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, OS 10.5.6. Guest OS is Windows XP SP 3. Thank you! P.S. to the Parallels team: why isn't there an article in your KB here about this? Clearly, it's a common problem.
