Okay so here's the deal my fiancée got an error code and so for some reason she thought it would be a good idea to put the reinstall cd in and just reinstall well this has caused me to lose years of work and lots of software that I can no longer find the disks for this just happened today. She said that she saved the second installation in a different folder in the c: drive I don't know if that makes a difference or not. I really hope one of you tech saavy guys can tell me there might be some hope.

All the information seems to still exist because I can still see some documents and files from the other installation.

Did she maybe install the OS again, meaning if you start your computer - do you get a boot screen asking you what version of windows to boot to?

Or right into windows with no options

As you say you can still see/access some files, she might have just installed windows again as a second operating system
-do you get the boot option when it starts

Yes there is an option but when I try the other one it says <windowsroot>\system32\hal.dll missing or corrupt so I'm guessing that's the error she was getting . Anyone know how to fix this corrupted system file cause I really don't want to lose all my stuff. By the way thank you for heading me in the right direction.

OK, sorry could not get back earlier

-what you would need to do is a repair installation on the one that you get the hal error on -it's not as easy as copying hal
From another folder and putting in the folder where should be

-needs the repair installation to get if back and configured properly

Have not seen in this particular instance before but can try to get this to work for you

As you seem to have the cd, I would suggest just the straight method first

Follow instructions in link below to get to the repair option and see what options it gives you (whether it asks you which installation to repair) if option is given for the one you know has issue, follow the steps to complete

Repair Installation
A Repair Install will replace the system files with the files on the XP CD used for the Repair Install. It will leave your applications and settings intact, but Windows updates will need to be reapplied.

Perform a Repair Installation


If the option is not there to just repair one of the installs or the one that has the issue, post back with any errors/messages that may come up (the more info the better to see if can maybe get some work around)