Hey guys.

Well, my new PC running XP Pro has gone tango-uniform on me. When I turn it on I get a prompt telling me that the 'hal.dll' file in the System32 directory is missing or has become corrupt.

I have an XP Pro disk but the PC doesn't seem to want to let me boot from the DVD drive. I tried running the Norton Ghost disk, but it's prompting me to write errors to the A: drive and I have no floppy in this machine. I tried switching the write process to the C drive but to no avail. I also tried installing the floppy from my old machine but the new machine won't see the DVD drive when I do, hence rendering the Norton Ghost disk useless.

I tried to install the NTFS drive as a slave in my old PC (which already has a FAT32 drive installed), but it only sees this as a primary drive and tries (and fails) to boot from it.

My question is, how can I transfer the 'hal.dll' file I've downloaded to my old PC onto my new PC given that the old PC won't recognise the NTFS disk of the new PC, there's no floppy drive to which to output the Norton Ghost errors in the new PC, and the new PC won't boot from XP Pro?

I was under the impressing that there's a patch for 98SE to allow it to read/write from/to the NTFS disk? I've only been able to find the patch for 2000 and not for 98SE. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Al.