Sometimes we look for the difficult when the solution is right in front of you.
I got the error message after flashing my AMD64 BIOS. Tried rebooting, then a repair, and the problem wouldn't go away. But, if I set the boot sequence up for CDROM first, then HDD, and let the bootup go WITHOUT hitting any key to boot from the CD,
Windows would start.
Tried the randall's solution. No luck. Tried copying Hal.dll to system32 still no luck.
Then by accident, I hit F8 during the initial boot. I selected my master 1 and got through.
Went into setup and found that my HDD boot sequence had my slave as the first boot device. End of probelm.
So, here is what was going on. I had upgraded to a larger hard drive, and kept the original as a slave. (Just to have access to files that I might have forgotten about. While I had erased the files on D, I didn't remove the system files. So, when I tried to boot, it was the system on D drive that would try to boot but all the necessary files needed to boot that disk had been removed.
But, randall's solution link is a good one to know. It helped me solve a similiar probelm on another computer where I had two operation systems to choose from, but only one installed.
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