my laptop 'died' a few weeks ago, in the sense that when i switch it on, i am greeted with a DOS style message saying:

"hal.dll is corrupt" etc.

i cannot get into windows, or access my harddrive in any way. i use my laptop to make music, and have about 90% of it backed up. the other 10% i'd obviously like to retrieve.

i've tried various things (creating backup discs for example) but nothing has worked. so i took it to a data recovery expert yesterday. he says the "data is irretrievable," unless i spend big dollar.

so what do i do now? i have a system recovery disk, but it will only reinstall the whole OS, not specific elements (i.e. the missing .dll) that i need.

can anyone help? or have i been PWNed by technology?

yesthnx