Hi all,

Please bear with me as I try to recollect all the events that led to hardware failure. I had a perfectly functioning PC when suddenly yesterday morning there was an error on start-up which said that hal.dll file was either corrupt or missing. I visited a few forums and one of the suggestions was to copy hal.dll file from Windows XP service pack Cd to local drive. Unfortunately I couldn't copy the file because it said 'permission denied' to enter the WINDOWS directory. Upon restarting the computer, another error came up saying 'Overclocking failed' and then it stated 'SATA device not found' for the primary IDE device but secondary IDE slave stated the hard drive name and disk space. On entering the BIOS setup it said that hard disk wasn't detected. I then tried to copy the RAID driver from the ASUS motherboard CD and tried Windows setup installation. It failed again and I now believe that my hard disk has failed. Please advise as to how to recover all my data from the hard disk and/or resolve the above issues.

My computer details are as follows:
- ASUS P4S800-MX SE motherboard
- Seagate 200GB SATA HDD

Thank you.