The latest problem is simply that after installing XP my pc soon gets blue screen and then won't boot due to a missing System file.

However, the real problems have been something that have consumed the last 16 hours of my life, this is just extra info and not vital but feel free to read of my despair

I have an Acer Aspire 5024WLMi Laptop. The other night I was transferring files from my D drive to an external HD and everything froze. I restarted and found out that my downloads folder that I had been pulling from was corrupt. Every time I interacted with it I would get a 'format C drive?' message. I then opened firefox but because it had a link to this downloads folder it froze the pc. Restart. Then when I opened VLC player again it froze because it was linked to subtitles file from my downloads folder.

So with despair I just wanted to clean it and used my Acer Recovery CD to clean out C drive. After I had done this it would not boot up at all. Which is odd because I've done this a dozen or so times before and it's worked. So now in despair over losing my D drive important files I have a mate bring his windows XP disc in the hope of using it just to backup my D drive. It finally works (cutting out so much of the story here, I have installed windows is some form over 10 times in the last 16 hours) and I backup my important files, phew!

We then boot up windows cd again and clean out C and D. I just want a new factory default machine again! I then try reinstalling with my original Acer Recovery hoping it will now work with a fresh pc but no I get the same problem where it goes to light blue screen and asks to do a check, if I decline it just doesn't boot and if I accept it starts finding problems and deleting folders going through all these silly files like MSN games/Acrobat etc then it gets to Online Services and doesn't do anything for 30mins so I give up. So I reinstall my mates windows xp and then start installing myold apps again etc. About 90mins later I suddenly get a blue screen of death and when I reboot it says a system file is missing or damaged. I find out I can repair it using boot cd, there should be a 'repair current installation' option or something similar but there isn't. Just the recovery menu thing. I have no idea what to do there. So I just reinstall, soon does it again. I reinstall again which is where I am now pleading for help before I have to install it again. I've now done a windows update straight away in hope of it helping, other then that I have no idea what to do? I just want a fresh restart with my original Acer Recovery disc setup.

Is this a Vista or XP machine Capone, as it sounds like the Recovery partition is truly mashed.

Did you set the machine to boot from the optical drive first in the bios when loading the recovery disks?

Thanks WolfeyMole,

It's a XP setup. I know about changing the order in bios. When trying to boot up normally I have hard drive at top and if I need to boot up a disk I put CD on top. Something like that.

So you definitely made sure that the cdrom was the first boot drive?

The recovery cd should in theory take it back to factory condition or when the disks were made.

Oh another thing, I know I use to run on Fat32 but since then changed it to ntfs as that worked. Not so sure what these mean. I read that a potential problem is that it's getting confused. If I have same problem next time will go into recovery conole and type

copy f:\i386\ntfs\sys c:\windows\system32\drivers

if that doesn't work,

chkdsk c: /r

or finally,

cd\windows\system32\drivers press ENTER
ren ntfs.sys ntfs.old
copy f:\1386\ntfs.sys c:\windows\system32\drivers

no idea what all that means, heh

Err I'm a bit confused on just what your doing here Capone with all this copying over, are you still using your mates cd?

Ah sorry, those commands were just options that I researched as possible solutions.

Right now I have installed my mates windows XP disc again and so far have done windows updates and rebooted (didn't do this before). It's now been running for over a hour with no problem. I'm just looking for solutions incase like before I suddenly get the blue screen and then cannot reboot without it saying my system files are missing. I wish I wrote down exactly what it said, I will if it does it again. Something to do with missing a vital system file though.