I have been trying to help a friend that had her computer go black. It’s a Dell Laptop from about 2000. I tried formating the C drive and installing XP pro. I get the error that the hal.dll file is corrupt or missing. I can’t get it to start in Safe mode or any other way. I get to the “R”epair portion of the XP CD but it takes me to a dos prompt. The only allowed entries there seem to be the list from “help”. I tried the d:\copy windows\system32\hal.dll c:\windows\system32\hal.dll and it can’t find the file. I’m at a standstill after about 10 hours of trying to get it up.
