Urgent Problem / System Recovery

Ok. Here's the deal. I have a 5-6 year old HP Pavilion 763n desktop. I figured it was time to restore it since I hadn't in a very long time. All the previous times were successful....but as you may have guessed from the title...something is wrong this time.

I have tried 3 times and I get the same problem every time.

The system reboots and after the HP splash screen....it says that the file "hal.dll" is either missing or corrupted. It tells me to re-install the OS to fix this problem...

Does ANYONE have any IDEA what the hell went wrong? This situation is really irritating me now because now I have TWO computers out of commission. I am typing this from my piece of **** Toshiba...that only runs in safe mode. So maybe, you can say 3 comps out of commission.

I doubt anyone can give me a concrete method to solve this problem, but any help is greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I searched online and found some information on this. It seems to be a problem that many have faced. I am going to try to find my Windows XP disc, but I don't think my comp came with one. It's been years.....crap

 

Well, I re-installed Windows in a separate folder and tried to drag the new hal.dll from that folder...into the old one. That didn't seem to work.

Is it ok if I delete the old WINDOWS folder...and rename the new installation to WINDOWS? I doubt that will work....I wanted to know how to remove the previous installation.

 

HAL stands for hardware abstraction layer. The most common cause for this error is a problem with boot.ini. I recommend going here:

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm

No, you cannot delete and rename.

 

How do I get rid of the old installation?

 

Format the drive.
Your system recovery may have a bad sector in it.

 

Ok. What I am going to do is format the drive and do a fresh install once again. I am also going to get rid of the other HP_RECOVERY partition....as it is useless.