Win XP SP1 Home Failed to Boot

hi,

i just bought a computer with Win XP SP1 Home Edition preinstalled. while tweaking the system, i had to boot MS-DOS from a CD and use the FDISK utility to switch active partitions (i was installing W98SE on another partition). after several switches XP refused to boot saying the file <systemroot>\system32\hal.dll (if i remember it right) was missing or corrupt. i have experienced this situation earlier, but then I had XP Pro and it suddenly got back to normal in some days. so i guess there is something with the Master Boot Record -- the file could not get damaged. the greatest problem is that my PC did not come with an installation CD and i have some recovery files on my HDD and i am trying to run them but it said SMARTDRIVE did not run and the process can be slow. it's been an hour or even more and it looks frozen.

is there any chance i could get the system back to work? i have some utilities that allow read only access to NTFS from DOS.

P.S. kindly disregard this, i reformatted the hard drive and clean-installed the system from a CD. sorry