Maximum PC

I'm trying to fix my sister's Dell M1710 XPS laptop. It's getting an error saying hal.dll is missing. I've run chkdsk /r, Dell diagnostics (everything ok), etc. with nothing working. So I decided to just run the system recovery, but it asks for a floppy disk. The laptop doesn't even have a floppy drive. Any ideas?

Anyone? If no one knows that can I manually format the partition that XP is installed without doing the automated recovery? I'm used to working on PCs I've built so I don't know if Dell has anything weird that the system recovery puts on where a regular XP install wouldn't work.

Thanks, I'll try the first part on there. The first thing I tried was the second step where you expand hal.dl_... It says access denied.

You are better off not trying to expand the hardware abstraction layer dll to grab the file... there are about seven of them and they are selected based upon the configuration of your hardware. However, Dell may only have one present since their laptops hardware is fixed. I am guessing this is the correct one: Halaacpi.dll

I would backup the hard drive before doing anything.

Did you try restore from safe mode if it is accessible?

If the first part of kleinkinstein's link does not work here is another help from MS.

If it doesn't work a repair install will need to be made, but this is hard to do on a Dell as a matching OEM or retail XP version must be used as the recovery CD that comes with the PC cannot be used and will destroy any data on the drive.

Thanks for the suggestions. I couldn't get anything to work because it kept saying it couldn't find any Windows installation. I think the file system must have been corrupted beyond that one file. I just formatted and reinstalled and it works.