[NCLUG] Mandrake kills MS

[Person Who Asked To Have Her Name Removed From The Internet]

I couldn't find a boot.ini file, so i created one based
on someone's post of web sites talking about the missing hal.dll file.
so i created my own, which looks like:

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(13)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partitions(13)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP SUGAR Home Edition" /fastdetect


based on a df of where windows is installed:
 df /mnt/win_d
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part13
                      5.6G  3.2G  2.5G  56% /mnt/win_d

that didn't work....
but I had also done something rather stupid,
following the website it said to "expand /cdrom/i386/hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll"
well, duh, i'm on linux and expand obviously works differently.
so now i just might have a very corrupt hal.dll file!
argh!

help!?!

as for the comment about OpenOffice and java plug-ins,
 i do realize openOffice could work but it's not installed at the moment
  and for the plug-in i've never been able to figure out how to get the plug-in to work.
 I tried before with netscape to recognize the latest java, and it wouldn't even
 allow me to run netscape anymore!
so yes, these are all future editions of issues but right now i'd like to get some work done.

also found out that my cdrecord for cdrom isn't working anymore, although
i can mount the cdrom drive.  i was using dev=0,0,0  is this no longer appropriate?
how do i figure that one out?

BTW, sound still doesn't work either with this new version of mandrake.

help!
i'm so frustrated!
thanks in advance,
-z