First, xp started to try to perform scan disk on startup repeatedly (not my machine or I would have looked at it sooner) about a week ago, during scan disk loads of "bad clusters" were said to have been found all over the hard drive and it would go crazy tring to fix them. She let this go on for about a week, sometimes starting up and sometimes having to re-start over again to get any kind of boot up. By the time I got to it, it wouldn't boot up at all. 1st tried boot disk order change (it wanted to boot from cd-rom instead of floppy first) nope,then I tried to replace the hal.dll file by booting from c with os disk and running repair. Said no boot entries found and err. on rebuild command. THEN, I tried to let an upgrade version of xp reload to replace all files, no go says no prior versions of windows found. THEN reload full version to try to get it up to back up everything and just reformat. FINALLY get it loaded and it wants to perform a scan disk again...then I got to see this thing run (about every 3% or so it finds these "bad clusters" and goes ape...so I hard shut it down in the middle of this and get it to boot up to windows (bypassed the scandisk) EVERYTHING is gone except the new installation of windows. THEN try to reformat finally....delet partition then it won't finish checking for disk integrity...tried to let windows format it by booting from install disk again and hard drive just sits there and skips with no progress. Sorry this is so long but I'm trying to tell them that it needs a new HD and they're going to take it in somewhere...does anyone dissagree with me?

it either needs a new hard drive , or is using a 40 wire ide cable, when it should be using an 80 wire ide cable, the one with blue connector to motherboard or ide controller, black to master hard drive, grey to slave-if needed.

Faulty or incompatible configuration of SDRAM can cause the symptoms you are getting, thus you may have a defective SDRAM module or aggressive SDRAM timings. I know, because after installing a SDRAM module on an IBM Pentium III PC with Windows XP Pro, I ended up getting the following symptoms: STOP *** 0x00000050 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA in WIN32K.SYS after I rebooted, Windows XP automatically ran Chkdsk and Chkdsk reported lots of orphaned files. STOP *** REGISTRY_HIVE_FAILURE and Windows XP displaying the error message that msgina.dll failed to load. You can be forced to reformat and reinstall Windows if you insert a faulty or incompatible SDRAM module.

http://sft-cyber.com/hal.htm The Windows XP hal.dll File Is Corrupt or Missing This is the Windows "Hardware Abstraction Layer" file and is specific to the individual computer and its hardware. 1. Access the recovery console 2. Try running bootcfg/ rebuild from the console 3. Try Start>Run>CMD. sfc/sfc.exe with the original Win XP disk in place The system file checker (sfc) tool scans all protected files to verify their versions and repopulates the %Systemroot%\System32\Dllcache folder with correct versions, as described above. -------------- http://sft-cyber.com/stoperrors.htm 8. Stop 0x00000079 or MISMATCHED_HAL---This error occurs when there is a mismatch between the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and the WinXP system files. It is often experienced on ACPI machines when ACPI BIOS settings are changed unexpectedly. Reinstall WinXP after making changes in the BIOS. See MS Knowledge Base(Q237556). --------------- http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm Cannot find \ Windows \ System32 \ hal.dll