Windows wont start windows.32.configuration is missing?

[zach1288]

My friend is having trouble with her laptop, its a newer laptop but im not sure what brand or anything about it. She lives about an hour from where i live. She called me today and tould me that she turned on her computer this morning she got an error message that said "windows.32.configuration is missing" What should i do?, the data on that computer is very important to her.

[shadowpr]

Have you tried to start in safe mode?

Could try a repair install.

If you need the information, you could hook up the drive to another computer and go and copy it from that drive.

[zach1288]

Originally Posted by shadowpr Have you tried to start in safe mode? Could try a repair install. If you need the information, you could hook up the drive to another computer and go and copy it from that drive.

Its my friends laptop and she lives an hour away and knows nothing about computers so i am trying to do this over the phone. Where should i start first?

[TwoRails]

Not much in Googling it, but you can look here to see if anything helps.

[shadowpr]

Ask them if they can start in safe mode?

What were they doing before this started? Did they change anything? Download anything?

Do they have the Windows disk? Is it sp2?

[glc]

knows nothing about computers so i am trying to do this over the phone

Sounds cruel, but don't bother. You (or any tech) needs physical possession of the laptop.

Where should i start first?

Get in the car and go out there. Bring your laptop and a 2.5" IDE (or SATA if that's what type drive it has) to USB converter and be prepared to do data recovery. I highly doubt any recent laptop shipped with a standard XP CD, almost everything in the past few years shipped with a proprietary recovery CD or nothing at all - just a recovery partition. Either way, an OS recovery without losing data is not very likely, and it's quite likely the hard drive is failing anyway. The hard drive will need to be removed from the laptop.

i go to start my laptop this morning

Please be up front with us if you are working on other people's machines over the phone.

the data on that computer is very important.

Impossible to handle over the phone when the user is computer illiterate. See my recommendation above.

[zach1288]

This is the exact message she is getting:

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

[glc]

That is usually a corrupt registry caused by a failing hard drive. If you are VERY lucky, you can boot with a XP CD and use the repair console to run chkdsk /r and get it booting again. If that doesn't work, it's reinstall Windows. Most recovery disks and partitions do destructive reinstalls - you lose all your data.

Honestly, this repair is beyond an illiterate being coached by a semi-tech over the phone.