Missing hal.dll and other problems

Hi,
I haven't posted for ages, cuz I haven't had any reason to. Thank goodness! Now though, I am helping my friend try to get her 'puter working. It crashed right in the middle of System Restore. Tried to restart and got the missing or corrupt hal.dll message. Neither one of us has a disk, so that was out of the question. Both our systems came with Windows XP Pro already installed. I downloaded the Avira NTFS4DOS and we decided to do a defrag first. Well.....it's been almost 2 days now and it's still going on.

I saw an entry yesterday, that read like this:

OBJECTS.DATA - MFT: 4859, 188 fragments, 6127616 bytes
100% - succeed

Then today a while ago I saw one that read like this:

OBJECTS.DATA - MFT:11238, 188 fragments, 6127616 bytes
100% - succeed.

Are they the same? It says not to interrupt the defrag because you could lose files if you do.

I really don't know much about her system and either does she except it is running Windows xp Pro.

Can anyone help?
Bev