So i shut down my computer and decided to clean out the dust, vacuumed it out nice and neat. Went to restart i noticed my slave drive was a little louder than usual and i get the error a disk error occurred ctrl alt delete to restart. I cannot get into safemode. I used a bootdisk (XP Quick Boot Diskette )from bootdisk.com and it give me the error hal.dll is missing. yay! What i've done is check all cables to make sure nothing is loose. Disconnected my slave drive. I've used the windows recovery console to bootcfg /rebuild. That didn't work. I've tried to expand hal.dll from the xp cd to my drive in the recovery console, didn't work. I've removed the drive and attempted to replace hal.dll by setting it up as a slave drive on a working computer, then copying a good hal.dll from "C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386" it worked but it didn't change anything. Not sure if copying it from the cd directly would change anything. I've ran chkdsk /r in recovery and it fixed something but it didn't change anything. The boot.ini file i've read of errors occuring in, so here is what mine reads from memory. [1]\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition" /fastdetect C:\ = "Microsoft Windows" [2]\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect C:\ = "Microsoft Windows" I also have no way to delete one or the other in recovery as there is not bootcfg command. I'm really at a loss here. Not sure if my main issue is the hal.dll or the boot.ini file?? Also i wonder if my slave drive croaked and it effected my master drive. Help?

oh yea fixmbr in recovery tells me that i have a non-standard or inacessible master boot record?

You should NEVER use a vaccuum on a PC due to the static electricity that is generated....that's why compressed air is used. If your PC was error free before vaccuuming & problems began immediately after vaccuuming, it would seem that you zapped something.

fantastic....any programs i can run to diagnose?

Well i had another HD that i threw in and did a clean install on, everything works just fine. I'm not sure tho how i should go about figuring out what's wrong with the other HD. Any help would be appreciated. All of the above problems still apply to the "bad" HD.