A couple of years ago I bought a used laptop.  I decided to upgrade the HARD drive so I bought one off of eBay.  Removed the old hard drive, put in the new hard drive.  Turn on the laptop.  I get the following message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\hal.dll.
Please REINSTALL a copy of the above file.

I get this message whether or not there is a cd in the drive.  However, if I have a floppy disk in it states it is not a system disk . . . I put in a dos boot disk and it will only acknowledge the floppy drive but will not run ANYTHING from it.  The hard drive is supposed to be BRAND new.

Am I forgetting to do something?  I would appreciate any help-however, please be gentle, I only know enough to get myself into trouble

The laptop is a Toshiba Tecra 8000, upgrading from a 6mb to a 40 mb hard drive and yes the new hard drive is made by Toshiba.
Did you install an operating system on the new drive?I can't get to that point.  It is as though the laptop is not reading the hard drive or the cd drive.  It reads the floppy drive provided I start out with a dos start disk, but then it won't run anything from a floppy I put in.

It has been a while since I have dealt with a new hard drive so maybe I am missing a step, but once that message shows up about the hal.dll any key I hit causes it to reboot and the message shows up again.Go here -> http://www.compphix.com/corrupthal.html to fix a missing or corrupt hal.dll file.

[glb]Gizmo73[/glb]http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm You will have to change the boot order in your bios to make the CDROM boot 1st.do you have a winxp install disk.......hold down the f1 key on boot...... now change the boot sequence to boot from cdrom drive....  use the tosh disk??A:\ sys  c:    is it win98+winxp upgrade??