i'm trying to fix a friend's laptop. She updated Windows, and now gets the error that <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupt when Windows tries to start (in safe mode too).

I burnt a copy of a Morphix Linux boot cd and ran that, but I can't get it to mount the windows partition.

So far, I did sudo su and became a superuser, then added the line
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ntfs auto,users,exec,ro,umask=000 0
to /etc/fstab

then i tried to mount with
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

but instead of the windows stuff being there, there's just a "negative sign" (red circle with white bar through it)

do i have to put her windows username/password in somehow? and where would i do that?)

once it's in fstab you need only specify either the partition or the mount point, not both.

without the necessity to add anything to fstab you could also do

mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1/ /mnt/hda1

make suer /mnt/hda1 exists!