Can't boot to Win 2000 after installing XP on another partition

[RianShelAbbe]

This is my first time posting a thread in a forum - hope I do it correctly.

My student was supposed to install DOS and 98 on drive C:, then 2000 on a new primary partition, then XP on another primary partition for a multi-boot system. Instead, after installing DOS and 98 on drive C: (and making sure it worked), he installed 2000 on a logical partition. That didn't cause a problem with booting to 2000 until he installed XP on a newly created primary partition. Now 2000 is the only operating system that system cannot boot into. If 2000 is selected from the boot menu, the error message states:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file"

Looking in XP Disk Management, the partition information is as follows:

C: - Primary - FAT 16 - 2 GB - labeled Healthy System
D: - Logical - Unparititioned - 2G - labeled Healthy 0 bytes used
F: - Logical - NTFS - 4GB - labeled Healthy 3.83 G used (2000's partitioin)
G: - Primary - NTFS - 10.8GB - labeled Healthy (boot) this is XP's partition

hal.dll does exist in F:\winnt\system32
boot.ini does refer to partition(3)\winnt for 2000's path

Is there a fix for this, or something I should try?
Or is there a reason why Windows 2000 will never boot under these conditions?

Thanks, any advice would be appreciated.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

A system like that only needs one primary (and active) partition, the one where DOS and W98 reside. (This could also be FAT32 with MS-DOS 6.22)
Any follow-up OS will create/add its entry in the bootmanager, which will automatically be located on the C-drive in root.
For that to work, the other partitions need to be logical partitions within an extended partition.