missing or corrupt hal.dll. Help!

[hagerphoto]

Hi There,

I have a laptop with XP home edition. I just ran my virus scan (all clean), disk clean-up, and started the defragmentor. The defragmentor stopped part way through and said that Windows couldn't run because it was missing or had a corrupt file hal.dll.
Through the help with Hewlett Packard, we tried the recover/repair cd - but can't get into it. They say the only solution is to have somebody retrieve my data for me off the hard drive or get an external hard drive case. Any suggestions?

(I really need to get me data before reformatting my drive.)
This happened after I downloaded the latest Microsoft patch. HP said the patches don't always work so well with laptops.

Any suggestions/advice would be really appreciated. I'm out of biz. until then.

Thanks!

[ultrasolve]

If you get an error regarding a missing or corrupt hal.dll file, it might simply be the BOOT.INI file on the root of the C: drive that is misconfigured

Go to the MS Support Site and have a look at this article on how to repair the BOOT.INI file. If this doesn't help come back and we will look at it from andother angle.