File Is Missing Or Corrupt

A student brought a laptop into the desk that would display “Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM”.

The affected system was a Dell Latitude D620 running Windows XP Professional SP2.
There are several variations of this problem. Errors in \System and \Software are the two most common. After research through the Microsoft KB article located at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545 i was able to water it down a bit for this scenario. Note that i recommend reading through and following the steps in order, but for the \SYSTEM error, I only needed a few of the commands.

First off, you need to grab your Windows CD, and boot into the recovery console. This is done by booting to your CD-ROM (F12 on a Dell System), letting the Windows installer load, and then selecting R for Recovery console at the first menu that give you an option to do anything. After pressing R, log onto your windows installation by pressing the appropriate number (usually 1) and enter your Administrator password if prompted. If you don’t remember your administrator password, you will need to reset it using a Linux disk. That is a topic for a separate post.

Once successfully in the recovery console, run the following commands, in order.

md tmp
copy c:\windows\system32\config\system c:\windows\tmp\system.bak
delete c:\windows\system32\config\system
copy c:\windows\repair\system c:\windows\system32\config\system
exit

Once your computer reboots, you should be presented with the Windows XP loading screen, and eventually your desktop.

Posted in: Add/Remove Programs,Corrupt,Devices,Microsoft,Missing,Problem,Unknown