what can I try to fix without having to re install work bench?
Find out what your doughter moved where and move it back. For somebody who is a bit familiar with the directory structure of AmigaOS it should be fairly easy to find out what is missing.
it won't boot up from the hard drive
One hint could be the error message you didn't tell us.
Enter Loadwb into the DOS window, open the icon of your boot partition and make a hardcopy so we can look at it. It's probably the Prefs drawer or the Devs drawer which has been moved away.
