Not sure where else right now....I'm flipping out.Much traffic here, so hopefully an answer I did a bad thing. I am using Win XP Home. I had a hard drive that had Win98SE ion it from an old system. This had a ton of pictures my wife was saving, so I figured I would just put in my system as slave....well some how or another, XP decided I wanted dual boot, and whacked my boot up...no boot... came up with missing or corrupt HAL.DLL ... I scoured the web and tried everything...no matter what, no fix. I even extracted it from my install CD and copied it ... plus all kinds of system recovery work. Fuinally got desparaste and tried a new install/repair...this did not work. Then I finally gave in after 6 hours and ended up reformatting my C drive partition and reinstalled XP...when it came to reboot the first time, that error again came up, even with formatting. Now I'm thinking I got a virus or something from that old hard drive... I don't know, but absolutely nothing I have tried has fixed this, even with reinstall. Any ideas ????? I have tried reformatting and install couple of times. Then tried running virus check via DOS/floppy ... the disk is dorked up.... need to buy some more floppies tomorrow and try again with that. Even deleted anbd created a new boot sector

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together.
All things connect......Chief Seattle, 1854