I made the mistake of suspending the startup of Windows from my Parallels virtual machine with the Win XP OS installed on my Boot Camp partition (I had an urgent need to leave my current location and couldn't wait for the startup of the virtual environment and Win XP boot to complete, so I just quit Parallels). BIG MISTAKE! Next time I tried to boot natively into Boot Camp, I was told there were missing or corrupted files (System32\HAL.dll). I dug out my Win XP Home installation CD (or is it DVD) and tried to repair the installation, but Windows command line utility said it couldn't help me beyond telling me the file was missing or corrupted. A Google search revealed that this problem can afflict Windows users who've never been seduced by the Mac environment, so I tried some of the command line incantations suggested by the forums where I found such suggestions. No joy. A hardware guy in my IT department suggested making a second install of Win XP to my Boot Camp partition, then copy/paste the missing/corrupted files into my previous installation. That WORKED!!!! Along the way I was reminded at how ugly and tedious the Windows installer is; one would think that by 2002 Microsoft would have been able to get beyond non-proportional bit-mapped fonts in their installers. Maybe Vista is better; I guess I'll find out soon enough. The bottom line, however, was that although I had to copy two files (HAL.dll and ntoskrnl.exe) into my previous Boot Camp installation, once I did so I at least had a Windows-only boot partition back running, with all of my previous software intact. I'm a bit fearful about uninstalling Parallels tools, and even more worried about REINSTALLING Parallels; perhaps I should accept the notion that the advantages of Parallels (pausing a virtual machine, saving an entire Windows installation as a single Mac OS file) override the convenience of running my Boot Camp Win XP install from Parallels. I know I'll spend a fair amount of time hanging out at the Parallels, Code Weavers, and VMWare booths at Macworld Expo SF next week!
I hibernated XP in Parallels one time, and upon trying to boot Bootcamp natively I got a message about HAL. I was afraid I messed something up. But I was able to boot back into XP using Parallels. Then I shutdown appropriately, and native Bootcamp had no messages or problems booting. I know my scenario is different from your's a bit, but I'm just wondering if you tried to boot back into the VM of Parallels after you got the error message while trying to boot up Bootcamp natively. It seems to me that when you boot with Parallels, the process loads on a seperate hardware profile that doesn't work booting Bootcamp natively -- hence the message. But as long as you properly end your Parallels session before using Bootcamp natively, I woud think those errors would not appear. Re-installing Windows and copying only two files from that installation, just to fix the problem seems to be a very arduous way to fix it -- BUT I very glad you found that it worked!
