Virtual PC 6 & Win XP - having issues, of course

[bryanthompson]

I hate to ask this, because I think running Windows on VirtualPC is so incredibly lame, but I have to. I need to test an app on windows, and I'm not going to dig my PC out of the darkness of the back of the closet. I don't know what might be living back there...

Anywho, I bought a copy of Virtual PC 6, and found my Windows XP Pro cd. upon install, I get this error: "File \i386\hal.dll could not be loaded. The error code is 4"

Did some searching and couldn't find anything useful. Any ideas? The computer is a dual g4, running Tiger. I probably should have sprung for VP7, but it was all they had at Best Buy.

[HardDrive]

Hmmmmm....curious.

The hal.dll is the Hardware Abstraction Layer. Its what allows the XP operating system to run on so many different hardware configurations.

This is happening when you are attempting to create a new XP virtual machine? Or does it happen after you have already installed XP, and you are trying to boot?

[bryanthompson]

it's a new virtual machine, never installed before. It looks like my disk might be scratched... I'll try cleaning it and trying again. I've done some more reading, and it looks like this isn't a common problem. It looks like the hal.dll gets dropped for one reason or another after it's installed, sometimes, but this fresh install issue sounds different.

So... i'm going to try to make an image of my xp install disk, thinking maybe that'll fix it. or at least rule out faulty media.

[HardDrive]

To late on the draw.....I was just going to post and ask you if the disk was trashed.

When and install is done, the file is located in \system32, so it has to be a toasty disk....

[techweenie]

Originally posted by bryanthompson
I hate to ask this, because I think running Windows on VirtualPC is so incredibly lame, but I have to. I need to test an app on windows, and I'm not going to dig my PC out of the darkness of the back of the closet. I don't know what might be living back there...

Anywho, I bought a copy of Virtual PC 6, and found my Windows XP Pro cd. upon install, I get this error: "File \i386\hal.dll could not be loaded. The error code is 4"

Did some searching and couldn't find anything useful. Any ideas? The computer is a dual g4, running Tiger. I probably should have sprung for VP7, but it was all they had at Best Buy.

I have VP 6. I haven't used it much... I doubt it does you much good 2,500 miles away, but if there's a suspect file you need me to pull off and send to you, let me know. Most DVD rental places have 'disk repair' machines, and that's probably your best first stop.