Hi there new here and a bit of a novice so please bear with me!

 

I have a fairly old Dell Dimention 5150 running XP, or should I say that ran XP.

I came back from holiday to find that when I turned on the PC i received a Hal.dll error. Simples?

 So back at work I checked out a few forums and the Dell support website they all stated that its quite an easy fix with the XP CD. Boot from the disk and repair. Fine easy enough but when I try this (after F12 to select the boot method) my CD / DVD drive sounds like its going to boot up but then I get a message that the drive is not ready hit F1 to retry or F2 to enter setup. F1 returns the same message no matter how long I leave it or how many time i press F1. F2 just takes me to the BIOS where everything looks fine (from what I can tell).

I'm going around in circles and getting dizzy any help would be appreciated.

Many Thanks in advance

Mike

PS I have checked the XP disk its fine on the wife's Laptop and I have tried booting from a USB stick but it states it is an unrecognized format or something!