Dropped laptop, Now hal.dll missing or corrupted?

[bonez318ti]

I snagged the cord on my laptop this weekend and it fell from about 3 feet and landed relatively flat on a hard floor.

Amazingly, it still worked, albeit it was very slow. It was especially slow waking up.. I restarted it and haven't been able to boot up since. I now get an error saying that hal.dll is either missing or corrupted.

I went into the ibm service partition and ran the diagnostics. There was one test that failed, i think maybe bad sector? I dont remember exactly. I also tried to restore my windows install from a backup.. but that didnt do anything. It just stayed at 0% for a few hours.

So how I'm afraid I have a messed up HD. I have a ton of data that I havent yet backed up (all my notes from my first year of med school!) What are my options at this point? (I'm way past any warrantee period). Should I just buy a new hard drive and try to find a way to pull the data (or whatever isnt currupted) out?

What kind of hard drives should I look for?

Thanks for any feedback.

[qchaser]

If you have tried to run a back up I assume you have an optical drive. I had this same situation once and what I did then was to run XP - repair and it worked.

Q

[bonez318ti]

I have the ultrabase, but i dont have it with me. I left it at someones house a couple of weeks ago... so currently I'm looking ofr a solution that doesnt require a CD.

I was trying to run the restore function from the IBM service partition.

When you succeeded in the restore, did you previously run the diagnostics program? Was there actually a bad sector in your hard drive?

[qchaser]

Actually there wasn't any bad sectors. Somehow just this file "was missing" and according to my own logic: when something is missing it needs to be recovered. After that I did boot from XP cd and did the XP recovery.

Q