My problem started after my husband spilled a big gulp all over the keyboard. He sopped it up somehow, but did not turn the laptop upside down or remove harddrive-battery & keyboard. The next day I tried to boot the laptop and this message appeared: Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root> \system32\hal.dll. Please reinstall a copy of the above file. After googling for a few days and trying some of the suggestions on other boards I called dell...they walked me through about an hour of attempts to boot the computer. They finally said my hard drive must be physically damaged - buy a new one. they tried to talk me into a ridiculously priced external drive. I went to walmart and bought a reasonably priced external hard drive. Now I'm trying to reinstall windows. If I keep my internal hard drive in the pc I can't get past the hal error message and the windows CD will not start. If I take the HD out and plug in my external HD then the Setup stops at the screen where you choose to repair, reinstall or quit. If I leave the external HD unplugged and the internal HD out then it tells me there is no hard drive to boot to. Someone please help. I need this laptop working & to somehow retrieve the info on my internal drive. I'm running windows xp on a dell inspiron e1505 laptop.