Non-Boot because of Hal.dll - need a fix!

Hello! Let me start by saying thanks for reading. A little help would mean alot to me. I'm having some confusing problems with my tower right now. Yesterday, I shut it down and restarted it to try to solve a network adapter error. I do this regularly. It seemed to be booting up normally: it passed the XPC Shuttle screen, showed me a screen that told me: Verifying DMI Pools Boot from CD: _ _ Then, instead of skipping to the windows logo and booting normally, it told me: Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupted: windows\system32\config\system It told me there that I needed my XP boot CD and to press 'r' on the first screen to start repair. I got this tower hand-me-down, so it did not come with a disk set and I neglected to make my own (silly me). I downloaded a file and used it to make a boot disk. However, when I put this boot disk in the drive, it did not boot from disk as I expected. It did not give me that option, nor can I find any way to boot from disk manually. Instead, this is what happened: XPC screen, "verifying" screen, and then it flashes a breif, quick OS selection menu which shows TWO options of Windows XP Professional, instead of just one. I'm thinking, wait a minute, where did that come from? No matter which I select, I get the following error: Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupted: <windows root>\system32\hal.dll Please copy or reinstall the file (guess on that last line) I've now gotten ahold of a Windows XP Professional Boot Disk. Hooray! It is a Dell brand disk, while my computer is a Shuttle brand tower, but as far as I can tell, that doesn't seem to matter, right? Anyways. These are the solutions I have tried already: http://swatrant.blogspot.com/2005/1... http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... http://forums.techguy.org/windows-x... On each, I have run into various problems. I can report these problems as needed if anyone needs to know them, but to make this post considerably shorter, I will skip that and go straight to my questions. What can I do to fix these errors? What are these errors anyways? Have I seriously fried my computer? Should I reformat? Every time I follow instructions, I run into errors, roadblocks, etc - how do I get around them to actually repair my computer? Will a repair installation fix these easier and faster than trying to fight with Recovery Console? Should I buy a new computer? Once again, thanks for reading. I hope I can get some feedback on this soon. It would mean alot to me.

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