Hello, after I had a virus attack on my Dell Mini and after I was able to get rid of the virus (winupgro.exe virus) with the help of various programs, things still weren't working correctly so I decided it was probably for the best just to reformat the said computer being that I kept all my needed information on a USB drive. Since the dell mini doesn't have a cd drive I tried just moving the items on the Windows XP SP3 CD that came with the computer onto a USB drive and tried to see if just updating the OS would help. In the middle of the instillation it told me a file was missing (atxqiz6x.sys). Since I didn't know what else to do, I simply stopped the installation and went about my way dealing with how things were. When I restarted my computer, it told me that it couldn't boot correctly being that the hal.dll was either missing or corrupt, but eventually was able to reboot after another try. So, thinking I could fix the problem I went and downloaded a hal.dll and pasted it over the existing one in my system. The computer worked until was restarted once again where I now get a message: Windows could not start because of an error in the software. Please report problem as: Load Needed DLLs for Kernel. Now it can't reboot fully and when it get's passed the Dell startup it brings me to a selection screen and tells me to chose between operating systems Microsoft Windows XP Home or Microsoft Windows XP setup. when I choose Windows XP it tells me about the Kernel problem I listed above. when I try the setup it tells me: Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>\system23\hal.dll please reinstall a copy of the above file. Is there a way this can be fixed this with the windows cd and a USB drive?

... good info here: http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org/ho... http://blog.ryantadams.com/2007/12/... http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_... Grrrr "...pentathol makes you sing like a canary" ... got brain freeze