Quick Help Please, XP wont boot

[sgtpepper06]

I installed a new demo, Civ 3 to be exact, yesterday. Came home today and booted my comp and I am getting this error.
windows/system32/config/system cannot be located or is corrupted. Enter Windows Xp recovery from CD to fix this error.

So I boot from CD and i go to recovery, and i am in the command prompt. So i typed in HELP and chose chksdsk options, and it said that it found one error and it is repaired. But when i rebooted i recieved the same error. First did i chose the right options for repairing, if not what should i chose? Do i need to reinstall windows xp? I dont want to sound annoying but could you guys help quickly, because i ran over to the library to type this out, but I have a comp sci project I need to work on..............

Processor: Amd XP 1800+
Motherboard: Abit Kr7a-133
Memory: 256 MB DDR Crucial
Video Card: Gainward Geforce 3 Ti200
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Audigy
Speakers: Connected to 400w Aiwa Sound System, Y-Cable
Hard Drive: 40 GB Maxtor ATA 133 7200 RPM
CDRW: Lite-On 24/10/40
Floppy: Teac
Case: Enermax FS-710B
Powersupply: 330w Enermax
Heatsink: SK6 (34C Idle 40C Full Load)
Processor Fan: Delta
Case Fans: 3
Thermal Paste: Artic Silver 3
NIC: 10/100 Netgear
Moniter: 21'' Eizo (No idea, got it for free)
OS: Windows XP Home
Internet: Comcast@Home

 

[TBC]

I have had this error also. And tried doing what it told me to by going to the recovery option. However the recovery option puts me at the DOS prompt which was useless to me. I saw no commands for recovery.

Maybe someone else knows a fix here, but I never was able to find how to fix it. I thought Windows was supposed to have a command line option so you could reinstall and fix/repair the installation, but I couldn't find that either with XP.

I ended up having to do a complete new install. Of course after that I then made/zipped a backup of my windows directory in case it happened again.

I do love WindowsXP, and would take it any day over any other operating system, but there are a few things like this that are extremely frustrating.

 

[yazz]

here is your problem:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=724557&highlight_key=y

 

[Adrian Tung]

I've just experienced this problem recently!

Here's the quickest way to fix it:

Using the recovery console, go to your Windows\System32\Config folder (on my system it's Winnt\System32\Config). "Dir" and you'll see your "System" file, as well as a "System.alt" file. That's your backup of the most recently-working config. Overwrite "System" with "System.alt". Restart the machine.

It should start up fine unless somehow the backup config also got corrupted.


Hope that helps,
atwl


EDIT: Win2K uses ".alt" for their backup files, but I notice that WinXP has ".sav" files instead. I fixed my problem in Win2K, but I'm quite sure the same method will work on XP even though I have not experienced the problem first hand in XP.