After much messing around and trying to get the file back to the system, it worked. I downloaded from another win machine and copied to a floppy, then got to the A: prompt on my hal.dll machine and copied to to windows\system32. First I had to remove the old hal.dll then replace it with the new one. I also reinstalled a copy of my boot.ini which I already had backed up on floppy, through the same method. Thanks for the help. I back to dual booting.

What I did was check some force button during a mandrake install then that is when it happened.