I am working on a friend's computer, and he has made it very clear that the last thing he wants to do is to wipe and reload his computer.

He has used LimeWire in the past, and has accumulated over 1000 entries of spyware and quite a few viruses. I began by first installing Firefox over IE8. I then ran disk cleanup, and cleaned up about 10GB of HD space. I then ran Spybot for spyware, CCleaner for registry issues, then installed Avast! anti-virus, and selected to do a boot-time scan for root-kits, etc. I rebooted, and I got a black screen telling me that "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

I decided to visit MS's website to see if I could get some help. I went to this link: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545 and followed the steps of Part One exactly. I got to the Recovery Console, but when I got to Step 5, I had a problem with the following line:

copy c:\windows\repair\system c:\windows\system32\config\system

Windows keeps screaming to me that the c:\windows\system32\repair\system is not available. I ran CHKDSK C: and it came up that there was an error, so i ran CHKDSK C: /r and repaired it. I really do NOT want to wipe and reload, but it seems to be my only option.

Is there a place where I can find the MS XP MCE 2005 \windows\system32\config\system file? And if there is a place, can I burn it to the DVD I have the media center .iso image burned to, and type the line:  copy e:\system c:\windows\system32\config\system?

Thanks so much for any and all help! I've been working on this for about 8 hours now, and I've researched pretty much everything. I need some fresh ideas.

Taylor

 

PS. Machine Specs

Intel Core Duo 2@1.6GHz

1GB Ram

XP Media Center Edition 2005 SP3