I was helping out a friend today, and he had a notebook which didn't have a CD drive, and when he tried to boot his computer, an error message came up saying he was missing a file called hal.dll. Couldn't find any method to fix it online, and I was wondering how to reinstall XP on to his notebook, since he didn't have a CD drive. Then I came upon this site, and followed the instructions to make a bootable USB drive that can install XP. And it worked! Now his computer is fixed and everything's working. So I just decided to post the link I found here, because it might help some other person sometime, and considering how long it took for me to find this site, it'll be easier to find too.
Link: http://www.liliputing.com/2008/04/install-...i-note-usb.html