Hello again, its been a while since my last update. I was repairing a laptop this weekend, one that had a corrupt registry. It was displaying the following error message when booting: “Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM”.

I brought up Google and found a number of sites that describe the error, some from MS itself, but most of them are overly complex and offer little in the way of help. I was just about to resign myself to reinstalling when I ran across a link from this site: Recover from an XP Corrupt Registry.

It covered everything that I needed and worked like a charm. I did make one change from the posted instructions; instead of booting into recovery mode each time (which takes forever via the CD) to copy files, I just plugged the laptop’s hdd into an external enclosure and did it that way.

Easy peasy.