Well, my experiment with triple boot on a Macbook Pro ended in failure. While I was able to get Mac and UbuntuLinux to coexist peacefully–albeit it with some shutdown/restart problems where the screen blinks in ANSI color at me with characters filling the screen–Windows XP just wouldn’t take. It insisted there was a missing HAL.DLL file, which I located and copied everywhere…to no effect.

I happened to mention the problem to Leslie Sessions (Twitter:TechLeslie) and she was kind enough to offer this solution a few days later. While I probably won’t try it (Windows XP runs quite well in VMWare for my purposes), I do want to keep the approach she suggested; below is her suggestion:

As for installing Windows, I thought about the problem and realized a problem I had at one time. I have quite a few Windows CDs, different versions. I know I had a dll issue before and fixed it. Now, I can’t get too technical as to why this happened the way it did, but bear with me.

For some reason, when I was installing it on a computer (plain old PC), it would not recognize the DLL file that I was copying over at all from any of the CDs, or even the CD I was installing it with. Whenever it showed the file, it showed the correct name, but could never really see the extension. I went online and got a copy of the same DLL file and put it on a USB drive. Then, when Windows was looking for the file, I was able to point to the USB drive. Worked fine, and I got Windows XP Pro up and running on the stubborn computer. I’m not sure if this is your problem or not, but it is worth a try if you haven’t searched for the DLL yet on the web.

Thanks, Leslie!

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