[davebreal]

1. last night I was playing online poker as usual on my desktop (w/ 1 month old HD).

2. out of nowhere the system halts and i am forced to power off/power on.

3. after power on/bios screen, i get a system message that "Hal.dll" is corrupt and needs to be replaced

4. i insert system restore CD-ROM and reboot

5. system does not allow me to reboot from CD-ROM, despite processes being correct in boot menu. repeat this many times, i still get error message, windows never starts, and i can't boot from the XP CD-ROM

6. today (right now), i power on computer and on 3rd attempt XP boots and i manually extract "Hal.dll" from XP restore CD. for someone reason my XP cd is not giving me an option to restore/repair the entire system. i had just restored it last month from an older HD going completely corrupt. Windows help page says that a corrupt "Boot.ini" may be the real culprit, but I'm not confident I have the power to fix this myself.

7. i am not sure if my computer is stable now, so i am backing up all of my drivers and maybe ghosting my HD to save a lot of heartache. i ran a "CHDSK" and didn't get any errors.

Guys, any advice is really appreciated here... I'm pretty much panicking as I need this computer to play poker on. What else should do in my case as far as repairing/restoring/backing-up?

This could be the last time I'm able to boot from this HD for all I know... then again it could start working perfectly now.