so i was trying to reinstall windows xp on an acer aspire one (model: zg5) netbook, as XP was running horribly, and nothing worked.
anyhow, i made a bootable USB drive copy of XP from an XP CD using 'WinToFlash'.
the 1st step in which XP bootable formats the drive and installs windows file works fine. it is, however, the 2nd step that i cannot get into- the final, GUI installation of windows. when trying to boot into the 2nd option from the usb stick, "GUI mode setup, continue setup + 1st start of windows", it says that "Windows could not start because <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupt."
I've tried to re-copy and overwrite hal.dll from downloading it online as well as copying it off the original XP CD, no luck.
i've tried the fixmbr and fixboot commands in the windows XP recovery console, nothing.
there's an option for "DEBUG, incase of HAL.DLL or NTOSKRNL.EXE not found errors" on this bootable version of XP on the usb drive, and it yields an "I/O errore multi(0)disk(0)partition(1)\BOOTSECT.DOS" error. i've done hard drive tests as well, and it passed the quick test, and the extended test took awhile so i aborted it. what else can i do? thanks in advance.
