Trying to boot up notebook Hard Drive 160GB into a Dell latitude. Useing Microsoft xp2003

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Check that you have not left a CD, DVD or USB stick or device plugged in when you are trying to boot as the laptop may be trying to boot from that instead of the correct internal hard drive.
HAL.DLL is for the Hardware Abstract Layer and if this is really missing or corrupt you will need to look for a recovery disk.boot.ini is normally used on such as Windows XP and you should be able to find examples of this file by searching on Google or the Microsoft site.
See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022 which gives examples of how to edit boot.ini for Windows XP.

Could be an incorrect bios hard drive setting. Dell has a good customer service area. Did you use same type of drive SATA TO SATA? IDE to IDE? If you changed over there might be a setting to account for the difference.

Most likely the hard drive is failing, run diagnostics on the hard drive if you have a resource CD. Or you can download them from support.dell.com

The first thing to do is go into the bios. To do this, power up the laptop and hit F2 at start up. Sometimes it requires hitting the F2 button numerous times. You should see message in the top right corner that says "Entering Set Up". Once in the bios screen, look through menu to see if your hard drive is recognized by the bios. If it is not recognized by the bios, it may be a defective hard drive or problem with the motherboard. You might also try removing the hard drive and checking for any problems with the connector then reinstalling the hard drive and trying to boot up again. If this does not work, I would recommend replacing the hard drive.

Unmountable boot volume indicating that the system cannot successfully read the boot sector of the hard drive.
Run the diagnostics on the hard drive, if it fails, replace the hard drive.
If diags pass, boot to the recovery console, run chkdsk /r If it still gives the error after that, you can try reinstalling windows.
If that fails to resolve, then again, replace the hard disk drive

it depend upon ur bios version
u can have hard 40 to 80 Gb

I suppose it can support upto 100GB , just get the BIOS updated to the latest release and check in the setup if the disk is accepted .

Reseat the hard drive and then get into bios and check if the hdd is detected ,if not you need to replace the hdd ,if detected reinstall the OS.

It sounds like your lap top took a fall. try booting into your bios and check your boot order and see if it see your hard drive there. has some one pulled out your hard drive and changed any jumpers?

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