Hi Mikee,
I've been trying to find a solution myself with a missing or corrupt file named sys32/hal.dll file and no cd present of course, but when i tried Alt + F10 at start-up it helped me repair when i actually thought that my repair command was non-functioning. Thanks to your tip it worked, however, i had to give up all my data on the C:/ drive since i didn't partition, so i recommend all users of this netbook to partition their hard disk.
Moody