System Restore without Windows disc?

Hi, looking for a little help on behalf on my mother who is having some problems with her laptop - it's a pretty old one which she just uses for general web browsing, facebook to keep in touch with family etc.

It will not start, not even in safe mode, and she does not have a Windows disc as the laptop was given to her by my brother when he upgraded to something new, but he had lost his Windows disc.

I've done some digging, googling etc and can't seem to find any way round this for her. Perhaps somebody here knows of a way to get to system restore other than going through safe mode?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

 

What is the make and model number of the computer? There may be a recovery partition on the hard drive. When you say it will not start, does the computer even boot up?

 

Make and exact model of laptop, please.

 

Have you tried booting into Last Known Good Configuration?

 

Hi,

It's a Dell Inspiron 6400 (pp20L). Apparantly they try to power it on, and all they get to is the following message:

windows will not start because the following file is missing or corrupt :
windows/system32/config/system

 

Did you try pressing F8 at boot and selecting Last Known Good Configuration as pwillener suggested?

Edit: What is your OS?

 

Have tried pressing F8 yes but nothing happens. The laptop is running on Windows XP Home.

 

Hi Stuart just pointing out that F8 at startup is the normal way to get to safe mode options. You said you tried safe mode--how were you able to choose safe mode if you couldn't get to the F8 options? (Last Known Good Configuration" is further down the list on the safe mode options screen.)

 

Sorry, you misunderstood what I wrote - my fault. I did say it won't even start in safe mode, but by that I meant we can not even get to safe mode at all.

 

If you are cannot get into the F8 menu to access Last Known Good Configuration you can try the following. It may work if you have System Restore enabled and your restore points are good.

Download the following program here. It is a German Site but the program is in English. Install the program on an XP computer. It will create an erd50.iso file in the following location.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset\erd50.iso

Burn this iso file with Imgburn or other Burning software that can burn an image.

How to write an image file to a disc using ImgBurn

This will create a bootable CD that can be used to do a system restore.
You will get a window during boot showing your XP install location. Click OK. When the desktop appears: Start>System Tools>System Restore. If you have any system restore points, pick one just before the problem started. Edit: this is a 30 day demo but should meet your needs to find out if the restore will work or not.

 

We'll give it a go, thank you!

 

If it does not work, you can also try to do a factory reset. All data added since purchase would have to be backed up.