New hard drive - must it be formatted before cloning to it?

I have had this missising or corrupt hall.dll in one of my friends' computer. I used google search to know what this means , how to repair and where to download this file. I ended up reformatting his hard drive, however, since he had problems which this missing hal.dll could not correct.

 

Just wanted to provide you guys an update: I slaved the imaged drive to another computer (was able to read from it this time) and edited the boot.ini file. Changed partition(2) to partition(1) on two instances and then I was finally able to boot. Don't know why it was changed and I know that my old drive (that I initially made the image backup from) didn't have two partitions... in any case, I was able to get back up and running.

Thank you all for your help I've definitely learned some lessons during this little ordeal...