cant get into XP Pro, missing dll file

Hi John,
Try booting your PC with your Windows XP installation disc (you may have to keep an eye on the post messages that come up, as you may have to press a key to enable you to boot from your CD Rom drive) Alternately you could change the boot sequence in your BIOS to allow your machine to select the CD drive as the first choice, rather than your floppy, then your HDD. Once the disk has loaded, follow the prompts until you get to the section that asks if you want to install windows XP, or repair the current installation. There are a couple of questions along these lines prior to the section that I am refering to, but from memory, I think it is the third time that this pops up. The repair should solve your woes and it will fix it. Good luck with it.
Brian K

H-A-L stands for Hardware Abstraction Layer, developed by microsoft. This dll is required in order for the hardware and software to communicate.i have tried a different approach to try and fix this, by adding my drive as a slave in another pc, also running XP ofcourse.Simply copy the dll from "the other PC" to ur system32 folder. This fixed my boot issues. i have also noticed that this particular file gets damaged or corrupted if u add ur drive as a supposed slave, and boot it in another PC with different hardware specs, as an "accidental" master. meaning, stored harware files, on ur drive is no longer available, since all the specs has changed.