Help!!!! My knowledge of computers is very limited and on a need to know basis only.....however, I have come across a problem which I have no clue how to solve.

After my children had been playing on the computer, I came to turn on the following day and was surprised by the message I have.

The system appears to start normally, ie with the Dell intel screen, however, before I reach my user password access, the screen goes black and displays the following message:

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

I do have the original discs that came with my PC, however, when I load them into the disc drive,they do not load, it must be waiting for some sort of COMMAND, but I dont know what.

Please help, I do occasional work from home, and need access to my computer.

Any help is really appreciated http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945380 Try this link, Daisy1210.How is she gonna do that stuff if she can't even boot to the disk?

Daisy, do this:
Start the computer back up and tap F2 while it is starting. This will TAKE you into BIOS. In BIOS you want to look for BOOT ORDER or BOOT SEQUENCE or maybe even just BOOT. You want to set your CD drive as the first boot device. You usually PRESS the plus and minus keys to move your devices up and down in the boot order. Once you have your CD drive set as the first boot device you want to insert your XP disk into the MASTER CD drive. If you have two CD drives the master is usually the one on the top. The Dell disk will probably say "Operating System" on it. Now exit setup and SAVE CHANGES (F10).

The computer will reboot. You may see a message that says: "Press any key to boot to CD". If you do just keep tapping a key as the computer starts. You should hear the disk start spinning in the drive and then see a blue screen with the words XP setup near the top. It will load a bunch of files and then you should see this screen:



Press R to load the recovery console. Then follow the steps from here:
http://icrontic.com/articles/repair_windows_xpYour help has been fantastic, but I cant get past the section in the Icrontic instructions where I need to type the 3 ATTRIB commands. I have the following screen:

C:\>

I have tried various combinations of

ATTRIB -H C:BOOT.INI with or without spaces, with or without caps lock, with or without \\ after the C:

I only get the following messages:
The system cannot find the file or directory specified.

As it does not show this message on the example screens given, I do not want to proceed to delete incase I MESS everything up.

Any pointers anyone can give would be appreciated, apologies if I am being a complete bird

Attrib...no slash and space between that and th command...
Yer close to getting it right...Apologies its still not working, would you mind typing exactly what i need to put, including spaces etc...Think I'm going to have to seek prof help on this one, need some files I have to save...Thanks everyone, you are so patient!Daisy try this work around. Start the computer and go to the window that stated Welcome to set. Select Setup Window Xp. Keep selecting the defaults ( DO NOT SELCET REFORMAT NO INSTALL NEW WINDOW). It will bring to a window thats states fix this Install. Select the fix install, it will fix the registry, and missing file, but will not delete any files. Let us know if this works.