i'm not at work currently, but a co-worker tried to start my xp pc and got the error that the "hal.dll" file is either missing or corrupted.

i thought i'd arm myself before i arrive tomorrow and so am asking for advice here.

it's a dell machine and i don't think there is a physical disc with xp on it. just a restore from the D partition.

there IS a copy of norton's go-back running on that pc.

all the fixes i see assume you're already running windows but in this case, the error occurs on start-up.

any ideas? thanks in advance,

terry