Boot up problems with Windows XP

Well, I broke a record by compromising two hard drives in three days.

The first, an 80 gb Maxtor with Windows xp pro with service pack 3, just started booting up very slowly, sometimes reaching full screen but then, whatever program I hit, would not fully appear. Once I was able to run clean disk but no change in boot up speed occurred. Sometimes it would get past password entry but not reach full screen and sometimes it would not reach password option at all before bogging down. Tried safe mode without results. Tried going back to last effective boot up (knowing that to be an illogical option) and that did not work. Gave up on this hard drive. Am writting a book and my data was backed up on an external HD and went to my backup internal hard drive.

The second hard drive, also running windows xp pro, sp3, was working fine until I ran clean cache and ccleaner. Next time I stared my computer received a error message; BOOT INI FILE / RE-INSTALL COPY OF <WINDOWS ROOT> \system32\hal.dll. Downloaded a copy of hal.dll onto a floppy from my wife's computer without screwing it up and realized I had no way to install it because windows would not boot up. This is an older HD and an older version of Windows and efforts to find the installation cd failed.

Needless to say I am stumped. Help would be deeply appreciated, Sincerely, Mike Jackson

 

Thank you for responding and sorry for my delay. Bad stomach virus & heavy work load bogged me down.

Only one hard drive in the computer each time. Reading my original info I noticed I said I went to backup HD. Careless use of language. I had another HD, not connected to computer that I used when the first one became incureably sluggish.

Mike