Major problem after install

[demji]

i made a dual boot windows xp/slackware 10.1 system... after i was done windows worked fine but when i tried booting slackware it said hal.dll was missing or corrupt. I know that i was not successful on my lilo install but my major problem is elsewhere right now. i downloaded a new hal.dll and replaced mine on my comp, and i changed the old one's name to be safe. then i rebooted and linux would not work. and i tried booting windows and it would not work. i tried a msdos boot disk and i couldn't get to the drive with system32 in it to delete the new hal.dll and replace it with my old one. during the linux set up i did not set it to view window's files... is there any way that i could use linux, by starting it with a boot disk and then make window's files viewable. if so can u tell me how cause this is a crisis. THX

[drakebasher]

I think you should be able to boot with your Slackware install CD and then look for instructions on using it to boot your system. It may be something like 'ramdisk=/dev/hda2' or 'root=/dev/hda3' (replacing "/dev/hda2" or wahatever with your actual Linux root partition). Once you have Linux up, mount your Windows partition:

mkdir /mnt/win
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/win
find /mnt/win/ -name hal.dll

If you have problems, be sure to state exactly what you did before the problem and then exactly what the error message or other problem was.

[retired1af]

If your file system under Windows is NTFS, the last thing you want to be doing is writing to it from Linux.

Your best (and safest) option is to boot via your Windows installation CD and do a Windows repair.