my friends Netbook had fake virus protection and was really a bad virus. I tried to remove it with software, but it was a pain and nothing important was on it anyways, so i put a fresh copy of xp home. Now since it was a netbook there was no internal cd drive and I don't own an external one. What I did was copy xp home from a disk to a memory stick using WinToFlash. That all seemed to work, it booted fine and had a beer for celebration. Xp home was loaded, installed all the drivers and software and was good to go. Restarted the computer and received a deadly message "<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll. please re install a copy of the above file" file corrupt or missing" Now when i insert the memory stick and turn it on, the boot menu pops up and i can boot from xp home, but only if its in. So I think it has something to do with the boot.ini file because it was installed using the memory stick. I just find it weird i can put the stick in with it, boot it up, take the memory stick out, and it works perfect. If you have any idea