Can't boot - hal.dll missing can't see screen!

[matsp]

Hi all. I'm having great problems with my laptop which has years of work on it which stupidly I haven't entirely backed up.

I'd be very grateful if anyone can advise/assist me in resolving the problems.

It first went wrong about a week ago when restarting immediately after having uninstalled about 10 programs using "add/remove

programs". I got the error message on start up saying "file not found: hal.dll", and it would just go into a restart loop if

I pressed anything. Adding to the problem, i'd been using the laptop with a monitor as the lcd screen was cracked, but the

first few characters of whatever the laptop was saying were cut off because the lcd screen is a widescreen one (this only

happens on startup).

I looked on the net and this forum and found that a windows xp disc is required in order to use a recovery console to sort it

out. I've now got a dell windows xp reinstallation disk, but this doesnt seem to be what I need. What's now made this problem

a nightmare is that in order to see the first characters etc (ie the left hand side) of the screen I managed to get into the

bios setup and switch to lcd screen as the diagonal crack meant i'd be able to see the top and left half which is what i

wawnted to see. However what I didnt realise is that the screen has now completely gone, leaving me totally blind to

whatevers going on on the laptop.

Ideally I want to be able to use the laptop again rather than just recover the files (though that would be a bonus in

itself). I have access to another laptop and was wondering if a usb hard drive docking station would allow me to resolve the

problem if i plug the problem hard drive into it and connect it to another laptop. I'm on a very tight budget but could

afford one of those (£17), but will it help, I really don't know if i'm looking at the right thing, and if not then how do i

go about restoring the laptop, or at least my files?

Seriously if you can help you would be doing me a huge favour.

[Sylvander]

1. If the laptop has a FDD...
Use this boot floppy to boot into Windows.
It substitutes for the Windows system partition on the HDD, bypassing any/all problems with the HDD boot arrangements [e.g. problems in the C:\boot.ini file].
You will be presented with a menu of 8 choices consisting of 2 physical HDD's each with 4 partitions.
You should choose the drive [1st?] and partition [1st?] that holds the Windows folder.
This would be the 1st choice at the top of the list.
When you hit enter the system floppy will attempt to load the Windows operating system files inside C:\Windows.
If successful, once into Windows you can check out the 3 boot files [particularly the contents of boot.ini], and try to fix the cause of the problem.

2. If you don't have a FDD...
Download this ISO file and use it to make the bootable CD version of the above floppy.