Ok, First off I'm new here, and I was rather unsure where to put this post so I apologise if this isn't in the correct thread.

I have a good background of computer knowledge but I have found myself at a loss. I recently travelled to Prague for a few months and decided to buy a cheap Laptop (Compaq evo N400c) from ebay, the system worked fine but as it is an early version of a notebook you need to buy the mutibay to attach to it if you want a CD Rom, Floppy Drive etc... As I don't use many CDs in my computer I decided against getting the Multibay and instead converted an old DVD ROM drive I had into an external USB drive, at first it worked brilliantly. I installed a fresh Windows XP Pro onto the system and was all good for a month or so. Unfortunatly for one reason or an other the system file became corrupt and will no longer startup without me at first repairing it using the Windows disk. Now as I was in Prague and hadn't brought my install disk with me I was left without a laptop which was obviously very frustrating. So one of the first things I did when I got back home was to try and fix the installation, to my dismay my laptop won't run the Windows Setup from the external drive anymore and is still going to the error message saying I need to repair the system file (I should mention that Windows isn't even getting to startup, It's coming up in command line format after system check) I have played around with the BIOS settings a million times and have got no where. as it is obviously a USB drive it doesn't show in the BIOS, but that didn't seem to matter the last time I installed Windows. I don't know if anyone as an explanation why i'm having so much trouble but any advice would be greatly appreciated. If you need to know any more details please ask.

Thanks in advance.

msm1003

Hey thanks for your reply. Unfortunatly I can't get to Windows, after the system check it goes straight to the error message (see below) It doesn't even reach the Windows XP splash loading screen. I have tried reseting the BIOS settings. and I have also tried going into the bootup options (F8) but there isn't an option to boot from CD and I have tried using Safe mode and Last known good configurations with no joy... Just the same error message.

This is what is coming up (it seems like a simple enough problem to fix but without being able to boot the setup disk I have no way of fixing it)

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Windows could not start the folowing file is missing or corrupt:
\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

You can attempt to repair this file by starting the windows setup using the original setup CD-ROM.
Select 'r' at the first screen to repair.

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