Windows won't boot!

Acer 5100 (xp) stopped working a few months back! It says windows could not start because the following file is missing
\WINDOWS2|SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM.

Telephoned acer for recovery disks! Problems is a bought laptop through a friend of a friend. As I didn't register laptop and can't provide password, they won't sell me disks.

Tried alt f10 but nothing happens. Enabled d2d and recovery in boot up screen. Still no joy.

I have managed to download recovery dvd's (x2) from bit torrent (Acer Aspire 5100 Restore DVD's) . I then set the boot priority to boot dvd first.
The files are iso. I have burned the image using imgburn on 2 dvd's. The disk starts the loading RAMDISK image. Then as it flicks to the acer recovery it quickly jumps to please wait.....

I am now going to decompress the files using winrar, then burn the files. But not sure this will make any difference.

Any suggestion please. Pretty clueless when comes to computers. If there is a quick fix please advise as I can't seem to find solution!

 

How about sending the laptop in , for software restoration from ACERs hands ?

 

You are way overkill on this.

That error message means your SYSTEM registry hive is either missing (unlikely) or damaged or "kinda misplaced"

About 10 percent of the time using last known good configuration will bring it up because it restores the previous version of the SYSTEM registry hive. The problem, usually, though is that the file is OK and exists, but Windows cannot find it.

Probably 50 percent of the time (when the problem is "kinda mispalced", loading the recovery console and running chkdsk /f will fix this because it repairs the file system so Windows can find the file

If you fon't have a Windows disk, so the following

Download the following file

www.thecomputerparamedic.com/files/rc.iso

burn it to a cd using any ISO image burning program

like this
http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

Now boot your computer and load the recovery console and then run chkdsk /f

When complete, reboot and see if the error recurs.

 

Yes, that is the next step, but try my solution first. Actually, in his case, he only needs to worry about one registry hive (SYSTEM) rather than all the hives mentioned in the KB article.

There are ways of simplifying even that task, though. For example, mounting the harddrive in another computer as a slave or using a BARTPE disk so you can do all that stuff in a nice comfortable gui environment

 

just on the note of extracting files from a bootable iso image and putting onto disk - it won't work, or at least won't provide you with a bootable disk

if you're haveing doubts about the quality of the disk burnt either burn another but at a slower speed or try a little program called CDCheck (free) to test the readability of the disk (or put CD in drive and see if all files will copy to hard disk with out error)

 

If you have an XP disc try this.

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/How-to-repair-Windows-XP-t138.html