Please help!

Ok. I had a nice dual boot winxp/win2k system. So, I thought I'd install mandrake 9.1, resizing the win2k part. sinced I never really used win2k anyways. The resize and the install went well, everything works, and I'm able to boot into linux fine.

Here starts the problems. I go to reboot into windows xp. I get:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <windowsroot>\system32\hal.dll. Please reinstall this file.

Uh oh. This can't be good. So i thought I'd reboot into 2000 andsee what was going on. Well, 2000 gives the same error! So I checked it out online. I found two solutions. One, to reconfigure the boot.ini file through recovery console. SO, i tried that. I got as far as the "Enter OS load options" and entered /fastdetect, and it gave me "Error: unable to add list" or something like that. So I tried the second option, expand the hal.dll file from the XP install disc. Well, that failed as well, giving me "Unable to copy the file" after I'd entered the command to expand it.

I don't quite see how the windows hardware abstract layer can be affected by linux, but it was. I'm pretty sure the windows 2000 part. is completely hosed, becuase it can't even be listed in the recoverytconsole("Error during directory enumeration") Has anyone else had this problem? I'd like to keep linux around, but I still need windows for certain hardware/software support. The hard drive isn't bad, it was running fine as of an hour ago, and it seems ok now.