hi everyone, Just one to check to make sure I'm on the right track!

A friend of mine has XP home. his PC will not boot up it says "Hal.dll is missing"

I went into the SYSTEM RECOVERY and type: expand D:\i386\hal.dl_ C:\windows\system32

it said, "There is no floppy DISK or cd in the drive"

so I took the harddrive out and put it in my PC and check for a virus... yes there where over 200... if not more.

Most of them are gone.... I also grab a copy of my hal.dll and paste it on his drive where his old one was.


Put his drive back to his PC and the same thing happen. "There is no floppy disk or cd in the drive"

I did the fixboot and chkdsk /p/r... still nothing.

The CD ROM is FINE and there's nothing wrong with it... I'm thinking maybe the virus got so bad it may have corrupted other major system FILES and needs to be reinstall or the HD is either bad or going bad. I didn't see chkdsk indicate anything that the HD is going bad.

being that I saw the HD and back up his documents and settings.... it Just might be going bad... hard to say yet but, that would be my last option... I check his boot.ini and it's fine.

I was thinking putting my xp CD and doing a repair or better yet a reinstall, considering there maybe other virus in his HD but the only thing is my CD is Fake but works... "got scam by a company" .
wayyyy back ago before I even got into IT.
I don't think that would be a good option there!


any option would be great and thanks spider