windows/system32/config/system with a twist

[scythepuppet]

I'm running a standard Toshiba Portege tablet PC with Windows XP, and I have a problem

Now a few months ago I accidentally damaged my CD drive, and this damage caused the drive to go faulty. It caused blue screens, sudden restarts, overheating, plagues, the whole nine yards. So I removed the drive as gently as I could, and things seemed to go back to normal. I had to be gentle with my computer, but it stopped reseting everytime I picked it up, so I thought I'd gotten out of the woods.

This morning when I tried to start my computer, it greeted me with a cheerful "windows/system32/config/system" error message. A couple hard resets didn't solve anything, so I began looking for solutions.

I bought that computer online with Windows prepackaged, so I don't have the startup CD-Rom, and as I mentioned, my CD drive is kaput. Does anyone have a solution, a tip, a voodoo incantation, anything? Please?

[caperjack]

not a whole lot you can do with out cdrom or windows disks to fix windows/system32/config/system,does your laptop have a recovery partition ,like hit f11 to run recovery ,this will most likely cause you to loose all info on the drive .
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

[scythepuppet]

Now, when you say everything on my drive, that means what, files? Like music and pictures? Because I'd prefer to hold off on that for as long as possible.

If I had a USB CD drive, could that work?

[caperjack]

Now, when you say everything on my drive, that means what, files? Like music and pictures? Because I'd prefer to hold off on that for as long as possible.

If I had a USB CD drive, could that work?

yes everything ,the usb cdrom might work as long as the bios has options for booting to usb device .