hal.dll and repair problems

Please bear with me as English is not my mother language and my technical
knowledge and terms are limited.

My 17 y.o. son owns an HP Compaq nx7010 laptop, Intel Pentium M 1.7GHZ,
512MB RAM, 40GB HDD with WinXP Pro SP2 with all the security and antivirus
updates. A couple of days ago he uninstalled NOD antivirus and installed Bit
Defender antivirus. When he tried to restart he got the system32\hal.dll
missing or corrupt message as described in so many other posts in this forum.

I read through all the relevant threads in this forum and the proposed
fixes. Most seem to assume that the Recovery Console recognises the installed
Windows and propose to choose “1: C:\windows” when prompted. In my case it is
not so. After booting from the CD and selecting “Repair” the Recovery Console
does not ask me to choose which installation to repair. I only get the c:>
prompt. The “dir” command is recognised, tries to run, but then gives a
message that it cannot run (I don’t remember the exact wording). The commands
“windows”, “win” and “winnt” do not work at all. So I think I cannot try most
of the solutions, like the one by Charlie White, mentioned here.

Thought my best bet was to do what the damn machine was asking for, i.e. to
re-install a copy of the hal.dll file. I tried the “rename
c:\windows\system32\hal.dll halORG.dll” command (in order to follow that with
a “copy hal.dll c:\windows\system32” from the CD) and it tried to run but
then gave a message like it could not be executed.

I then tried the John Barnett solution, obviously without the step of
selecting the relevant installation so it was no surprise that the
“bootcfg/list” was not recognised.

Finally I tried the “chkdsk c: /r” command suggested by Ron Martell. The
process was very slow. After 90 minutes it showed 3% progress so I left it to
run overnight. This morning I found it saying 50% complete and then a message
like there are one or more volumes that are un-repairable.

Someone on this forum said that re-installation is not the answer. So my
question is: What should I do next short or reformatting and/or re-installing
windows?

Thank you in advance for any help.

Costas
(not an expert, not even in asking questions)
.

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