Receiving ".....the following file is missing or corrupt \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"

Most common cause:  a failing hard drive with bad sectors.  To confirm, power on, press F12, load the Dell diagnostics and run the extended (NOT just the quick) test on the hard drive.

The Extended Diagnostics ran fine as well.    BIOS sees the SATA drives but the Windows install CD doesn't seem to be able to connect to them.

For instructions on how to recover from that, see

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545

Read carefully :-)

I've seen reference to installing the SATA drivers using a USB memory key instead of floppy, but I don't remember where I saw it.  I need to look it up myself, as I have a (personal) system I plan to install XP on soon and it has SATA only for drives.

Thanks, unless I am missing something, this article/publication requires access to the SATA drive.    I can't get that far.    When I use the Windows CD to boot and I select recover or install, it tells me I don't have a hard drive.

It appears that the supplied OEM Windows CD does not have drivers for SATA hard drives thus you can't access them to reinstall or recover.    The only drive that Windows is finding is my 500gb USB connnect harddrive.   As soon as I unplug it I get messages regarding no hard drives.

I thought I might be able to get around it by introducing the appropriate .INF files (as a mass store device) however after pressing F6 the windows install expects the source to be on drive A (I do't have a floppy drive)

At this point I will try anything.    I will try it when I get home and let you know how it goes.    I will copy the .inf files from the recovery disk to the flash drive and see if it will read from it.

Unfortunately, it is not recognizing my flash drive as drive a.

grech01

If you are not using RAID, or don't have a floppy drive and wish to reinstall XP, enter the setup, scroll down to drives, press Enter or + to expand the drive menu then down to "SATA Operation", press Enter.

Change the SATA operation mode to "RAID Autodetect/ATA" press ESC to save and exit the BIOS.

Then XP should install without a problem.

Bev.

Problem resolved using the following:    I had to attach the primary drive to another computer as the slave to accomplish this.

Here is What I Did

Read this

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307545

Had to unlock System Volume Information Folder

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309531/

Copied

From the Snapshot folder, copy the following files to the C:\Windows\system32\config folder

_REGISTRY_USER_.DEFAULT

_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SECURITY

_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE

_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SYSTEM

_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SAM

Renamed existing files to .old

                Rename DEFAULT to DEFAULT.OLD

Rename SECURITY to SECURITY.OLD

Rename SOFTWARE to SOFTWARE.OLD

Rename SYSTEM to SYSTEM.OLD

Rename SAM to SAM.OLD.

Then renamed the files copied from the System Volume Information Folder

            Rename _REGISTRY_USER_.DEFAULT to DEFAULT

Rename _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SECURITY to SECURITY

Rename _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE to SOFTWARE

Rename _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SYSTEM to SYSTEM

Rename _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SAM to SAM

grech01

Pleased to hear that the problem is resolved and thank you for posting the solution.

Bev.

I had a similar problem with my Dimension 8400 and I found an easier solution. My system is a Dimension 8400, with Windows XP and the hard disk is configured with RAID 0. When I ran the Recovery Console, all I get is a "C:\".  After much struggle, I realized the system was not reading the hard drive. I confirmed that by using the command "map", and it only showed the floppy and the optical drives.

I then used a different computer to download the hard disk driver from Dell, and put the driver in a floppy disk.

When I booted up the computer using the XP operating system disk, I pressed F6 when it asked if I have drivers for SCSI or RAID. Afterwards the computer had no problem reading the hard disk.

I used the method as described in:

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&dl=false&l=en&s=gen&docid=89C2285FB22749B5ABF7CCB9CB612D47&doclang=en&cs=

and I was able to fix my computer.

Oh well, I  have a similar problem with my Dimension 9200 with Windows XP MediaCenter and  the hard disk (300 GB) configured with RAID 0.

When I try to load the Recovery Console to do the recovery procedure, all I get is a blue screen with STOP: 0x0000007b etc. etc...

Then I used a different computer to download the hard disk driver from Dell, next I put the driver in a floppy disk. When I booted up the computer using the XP OS disk, I pressed F6 to install the driver but I've got the same blue screen.

Thanks in advance, Giovanni

I have to second this solution (THANK YOU, silly09!).  I was receiving the same error, with the same RAID configuration.  I just want to clarify that I did not need to go through the method in the supplied URL for the Dell support article.

1) restart the machine with the Windows XP setup CD in the drive and my RAID drivers disk in a USB floppy drive

2) in my case, I had to press F12 to go to the boot menu to specify that the CDROM is the startup volume to bypass the floppy drive.  If my floppy disk was not in the drive by this point in time, however, subsequent attempts to load the driver would fail since XP Setup would not recognize the floppy disk in the drive.

3) Early in the XP Setup, press F6 to load a third party RAID or SCSI driver

4) Once the driver is specified (I'm no longer in front of the machine at this point and am reciting from memory), I'm given a choice to Begin Setup, Repair a Windows Installation, or Exit setup.  I chose to Exit.

Windows started normally.  What's maddening, of course, is that I can't figure out WHY this happened in the first place.  It's the second time this problem has occurred in under a year with this machine (we re-formatted, re-installed, and re-stored backup data the first time to the tune of several hours).  A review of the windows logs revealed no helpful information.  What would blow away this driver?  Is this driver even stored in a location accessible to the NTFS file system or does it live outside of that FS somehow?  Is this the result of bad sectors?  We'll run a CHKDSK at the end of the day...