Hi-I am trying to help out friends with a Gateway Notebook. Was working fine one day, then next when attempted to boot up they received the <windows root>\system32\hal.dll missing or corrupt, reinstall or repair error message. The computer came with an Operating System Disc which only has a recovery console option. I have attempted the repair from there with no success. I have also tried to boot in safe mode and using all options from the F8 screen. I borrowed a Windows XP Media Center Edition install CD to attempt a repair. I can use F10 to boot from CD and it goes through the Windows setup and gets to the screen with the choices of install (press enter) or repair (press r). With either choice, the next message on the screen is that setup did not find any hard disk drive drives installed in the computer. I cannot get to a repair screen to do any of the commands I have found on the support pages. I know they would like NOT to lose any or all of what is saved (documents, image files, installed applications, etc.). Is there a way to do this? What now? Any ideas and information is greatly appreciated!

Hello,
If you got an error messege that no hard drive found than your hard drive has failed OR it is a SATA hard drive, and XP does not have the drivers for it.
Since you have a computer, do you know how to take the hard drive out of your friends, and put it in yours as a secondary drive?
You can then pull the Data off of the drive.

Thanks for your reply. I do have other laptops, all of which are operating on Vista. Will this matter? The only computer I have still running XP is a PC. Again-thanks for your help and information.