WINDOWS/SYSTEM 32/CONFIG/SYSTEM?

[sculptor]

My daughter has a problem with her system and instead of booting into Windows XP Home she gets the message:
WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SYSTEM file damaged or missing.
Is it possible to repair this file through the recovery console as for some reason I cant do an install/repair.
Tom.

 

[riddlermarc]

There are a few pointers here that might be of interest?

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/16946/
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307545

Let us know, good luck

 

[J.B]

what happens when you try to do a repair?

 

[mr.bond]

One more thing to try, based on my experiance with a bad batch of Dell pc's at work in which every HDD died within months. Each having a very similar error message on boot.

Run a disk diag utility on your HDD, it may well be dieing.

 

[sculptor]

There are a few pointers here that might be of interest?

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/16946/
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307545

Let us know, good luck

Thanks for the reply riddlermarc.
I have tried to follow the solution on the above microsoft page but its not working.
I can create the tmp directory in the recovery console but cant copy the necessary files to it.
eg.
copy c:\windows\system32\config\system c:\windows\tmp\system.bak
the file could not be copied
copy c:\windows\system32\config\software c:\windows\tmp\software.bak
the file could not be found

Im assuming that the recovery console is trying to copy the original files from the c drive to the tmp directory.
Does this mean that the files are so badly corrupted to copy or that they are actually missing?

The recovery console dose not ask me to log on as the administrator, do I need to do this inorder for the solution to work?

Im trying to recover her Uni work and would appreciate some help on this one if any one knows how to do this.
She had password protected Windows so I cant just install Windows on another partition and copy the files across.
Tom