Alternatives
I agree with Bill, a faulty RAM won't cause the HAL error by itself, it's something else you did, although having a faulty chip may have exacerbated it. MSKB have suggestions about cures for this HAL problem, or Google the term, or error message.
A few more alternatives, if you can slave a spare drive or have a CD burner, is to use something like a Linux Live CD to access the main drive and copy to the spare drive or to burn to a CD R/W.
Similarly with Bart's PE, which give access to a XP like environment in which to salvage the data.
Both options are free, the only costs are the hardware, if you don't have them already.
Then you need to rebuild the OS from scratch (FDISK, Format C, reinstall etc) and copy your data back afterwards.
There are other disaster recovery tools available free, such as Ultimate Boot CD, or Hirens Boot CD. Google the names to find those links easily.
an aside:
I do seem to be coming to these threads late, but I blame TR for putting the link into Sept 6th NetNote newsletter *** wink ***
