This day, i was scanning my computer with AVG antivirus and surfing internet on the same computer. Suddenly the computer displayed a blue screen saying some message about the physical memory dump. It said to restart the computer if it was the first time i faced such a situation so i restarted the computer, and chose the last known good configuration. But the windows XP didn't start, instead it displayed: "Cannot load hal.dll file please reinstall the file.".....The computer also has vista installed. vista works fine but is slow compared to earlier.

I need to restore the XP to make it work again. What should i do? Suggest smthin.

detailed reinstallation of the hal.dll:

Restore Hal.dll - How To Restore Hal.dll From the Windows XP CD - Hal.dll

I understood the process of reinstalling the hal.dll file through recovery console. But the problem now is the xp installation CD is not read. I can't enter the recovery console at all. I made the boot device priority to the CD/DVD ROM from the BIOS. I restarted the computer. The screen displays: Press any key to boot from the CD. I pressed a key but there is no progress in the process. No setup initializes and the system stucks to that point. What may be the problem?

try to clean the optics drive and the installation disc to see if it performs better.

Another explaination may be that you are not just missing a hal.dll but a bad drive may be your problem.