amyallen.

Thank you for using the Dell Community Forum.

Put the WinXP disk in the drive and boot your computer. Once it boots up you should be able to choose the Repair option.

When I do that it  brings me back to the same screen, "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32|CONFIG\SYSTEM

You can attempt to repait this file by sarting Windows Setup using the original Setup CD-ROM. Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair.  "

It sounds like the boot order is wrong?

You need to go into the BIOS (F2 during startup), and change it to boot/check for CD/DVD, then the hard drive, then anything else (i.e. floppy drive) :emotion-55:

yes! I was able to go in and change the order. Now its booting from the disk and loading a bunch of files and now brought me to the repair window. yippeeee! Hope this fixes it. thank you, thank you, thank you!

ok, what do I do now?  I selected 'r' then it wanted me to selec c:\windows or f:\windows, I selected the c:\windows. If I type help it shows all the commands I can select, but I dont know what command I should select to fix my computer.

You can find complete instructions here, including instructions how to recover from this registry corruption if CHKDSK /R does not work.

Fix 1.C:\Windows

Hope this helps

thank you!

I am able to get this to work CHKDSK /r..

darn. It looks like Im going to have to reinstall XP as my computer is not repaired. I ran the CHKDSK /r on both my drives and now it brings me back to the blue windows freeze screen. sigh. Fortunatly I was able to back up my photos last week, I dont think I had any important docs on the laptop.

I'd make sure to keep making regular backups from now on as well, because a 'repair' install should've worked?

Do a 'clean' install by all means.  If you subsequently continue to have the same problem, it might suggest one of your hard drives is on the way out?

Do you have them set up in a RAID array, or are they two separate disks (primary/slave)?

It's obviously the disk on which you've installed the OS which is causing the problems, so keep an eye on it.

Hard drives which are failing usually show different symptoms (grinding noises etc), but still.

I recently was infected with the Vundo trojan and thought I had all that resolved using a malware removal program. Guess not.