Member Avatar for 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?

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That error means Windows cannot load the SYSTEM registry hive (the registry data that tells Windows which drivers and services to start). Before doing anything invasive, try the non‑destructive boot options: press F8 at power‑on and choose "Last Known Good Configuration", and try "Safe Mode" — if Safe Mode starts, run System Restore to a recent restore point. These steps often recover a corrupted hive without touching personal files.

If those fail you need external boot media or to work on the disk offline. As noted, a USB CD drive can be used if the BIOS will boot from USB. If you cannot boot from external media, remove the laptop drive, put it in a USB enclosure or connect it to another PC and copy your personal data (C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Desktop, My Documents, Mail/PST files, Pictures, etc.) to a safe location before attempting repairs.

When you have Recovery Console/WinPE access you can back up and replace the damaged hives with the installer copies stored in C:\Windows\Repair. From the recovery prompt (or a command prompt with the system drive mounted) a typical sequence is:

cd \windows\system32\config
ren system system.bad
ren software software.bad
ren sam sam.bad
ren security security.bad
ren default default.bad
copy \windows\repair\system system
copy \windows\repair\software software
copy \windows\repair\sam sam
copy \windows\repair\security security
copy \windows\repair\default default
exit

Notes and cautions: the Repair folder holds install‑time hives, so this usually gets XP to boot but can revert installed programs/registry settings to factory state — user files remain. If those files are missing or the copy fails, use a WinPE/Live Linux environment or vendor recovery media to extract restore points or obtain official recovery/reinstallation media from Toshiba. Always back up user data before attempting registry replacements or reinstalling.

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Member Avatar for 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 .

Member Avatar for 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?

Member Avatar for 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 .

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