hal.dll

If those characters send chills down your spine because you cannot make them leave your Boot Camp’s Windows XP bootup screen, then here is a simple guide to getting XP working on your Mac that has (up to this point) been proven bulletproof. I have spent several hours on the phone with Apple Tech support who, in the end, deemed my Macbook a special case. These instructions – some from Apple and some from Google – fixed that error and (hopefully) will fix yours. You may not need to complete all of the following steps, but this is a compilation of every possible fix that should make your installation go smoothly.

1. Check for any software updates Apple has for your Mac. There was an EFI on recent iMacs that prevented the installation of XP through Boot Camp.
2. Use the Boot Camp utility to remove any Boot Camp partitions you already have on your Mac.
3. Again, open the Boot Camp utility. Make a Windows partition on your Mac that is 32 GBs. This makes a huge difference. It fixed my problems. Make sure your partition is 32 GBs, otherwise it may not install!
   1. If your Boot Camp utility cannot partition the drive first, try rebooting and running the utility again. If that does not work then continue on with 2.2.
   2. Reboot onto your Leopard Install Disc (pop the disc in, reboot and hold down ‘c’).
   3. Open up Disk Utility from the the Utilities Menu.
   4. Click on your OS X hard drive from the hard drive list in Disk Utility.
   5. Use the Disk Utility to “Repair Permissions” and “Repair Disk.”
   6. Boot back into Leopard and open the Boot Camp Utility again.
   7. If this still doesn’t work you need to completely reinstall OS X after formatting your Mac drive.
4. Boot into your Windows setup disk.
5. Walk though the Windows setup process until you get to the partition selection.
6. Pick the new 32 GB partition as your new Windows setup drive.
7. In the next screen format the drive with NTFS (quick). If you do not see this option you will have to restart in the Windows Install CD and follow the preceding instructions. Please note if your XP Install CD has no Repair Console option you will need to modify your XP Install CD. A quick search on Google will tell you how.
   1. After the Windows Install CD finishes loading, open the Repair Console
   2. When the console loads type “Map”. Remember the drive letter associated with your Boot Camp partition.
   3. Type “format <driveletter>: /Q /FS:NTFS” where <driveletter> is the one you got from the previous step.
   4. Reboot into your Windows XP Install CD and install XP on your recently formatted drive.

And that’s it! With luck this will take care of any obstacles in your way of installing Windows XP on Leopard.

There are other solutions to getting XP up and running on OS X, but within time Apple will hopefully release a bug fix to this horrendous error. Meanwhile, I’m stuck paying the phone bill I racked up with Apple support.

Enjoy.