How to reinstall ACPI Fixed Feature button?

ZalekBloom

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Oct 20, 2009
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My WinXp PC with Asus MB P5GC-MX/133 and with 2 HD crushed. In my first installation I installed WinXP SP3 on the “wrong” disk. Then I installed WinXP on the correct disk – each time from the same DVD.
Now I have a strange situation: when I boot from the “wrong” disk – everything is OK. When I boot from the “correct” disk – system sometimes hangs and when I try to shout if off – I am getting a Window screen which says “now it is safe to turn your computer off”. I also noted the when I display the system profile, after a boot from the “wrong” disk it has “ACPI Fixed Feature button”, “Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System” – this features are missing when I boot from the “correct” disk.
In both times the system boot from the same hardware, including BIOS.
So my question is: How do I make the system installed on the “correct” disk “Microsoft ACPI-Compliant” with “ACPI Fixed Feature button”?

Thanks

Zalek
 

ZalekBloom

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After a lot of searching here what I found:
In Device Manager - Computer - I had 2 entries:
ACPI Multiprocessor PC
Standard PC

I tried to delete "Standard PC", but I couldn't. So I deleted "ACPI Multiprocessor PC" and tried to convert "Standard PC" to "ACPI Multiprocessor PC" - but did not succed.

It looks that all this information WinXP is taking from hal.ll

After reading http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299340 I come to conclusion that I need to make WinXP repaire and force WinXP to accept "ACPI Multiprocessor PC".
From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299340

To prevent Windows XP from automatically determining the system HAL during the upgrade or the installation of Windows XP, you can manually force in a system HAL. To force in a system Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) during an upgrade or installation of Windows XP, follow these steps:

During the Text-mode phase of the Setup program, when you receive the following message across the bottom of the screen, press F5:
Press F6 if you have to install a third-party SCSI or RAID driver.
Note If you press F7, the Standard PC HAL loads and the ACPI compliance check is bypassed.
You receive the following list of computer types. A brief description of each HAL is included here:
ACPI Multiprocessor PC
Applies to a multiple-processor ACPI computer.


Anyway - it did not help. It still shows "Standard PC" and I am so pissed off I am going for beer to cool down.

Zalek
 

ZalekBloom

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Well - problem solved. All this mess happened when I to reinstall WinXP. Actually I made 2 installs - the first one on a small disk was successful, but during the second one I got a message that hal.dll was missing of corrupted. So I expaned hal.dl_ from the cd - it was wrong. For each MB and each processor type there are different *hal*.DL_ files which need to be expanded and renamed to hal.dll.
So I copied hal.dll and ntoskrnl.exe from the first successful install - and my PC is working!

Zalek