please help...laptop not booting

My laptop specs are:

Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition
Mobile AMD Athlon™ XP-M 2500+ Processor
QuantiSpeed™ Architecture operates at 1.8GHz
266 MHz Front Side Bus and 512K L2 Cache
512 MB DDR SODIMM (PC 2100)
8-cell Lithium-ion (Li-ion)
60 GB HDD 1
DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive (24x24x24 CD-RW; 8x Max. DVD-ROM)
15.4" Widescreen TFT LCD WXGA (1280 x 800 max. resolution)
ATI® RADEON™ (Integrated)
64 MB DDR Shared Video Memory
10/100Mbps built-in Ethernet
56K ITU V.92 Fax/Modem
PC2001 Compliant AC '97 Audio
Built-in Stereo Speakers
Touchpad with vertical Scroll Zone
3 USB ports, 1 VGA external connector, 1 Parallel Port, 1 S-Video Out, Microphone In, Headphone/Audio Out, PCMCIA Slot (Card Bus type I and type II)
1.36"h x 14.0"w x 10.0"d
6.6 lbs. (7.75 total travel weight)
Service Packs 1 & 2 are installed as well as all other updates to date.

My problem is,

Whenever I try to boot my laptop, I get the message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root> \system32\ntoskrnl.exe.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

I went through various threads and methods of trying to get past this, can someone help me fix this issue.

 

What did you do before you rebooted your laptop?

Does safe mode work?

 

I was online. I was in AOL chatting and I was in 3 other IE windows playing tun based games (Speedwarz.com, Streetwarz.com and themafiaboss.com). Then my pc froze up to where I couldn't do anything and the hard drive showed no activity. I tried to ctrl+alt+del it and got no response. Then tried to ctrl+alt+del reboot it. So I hard rebooted it through the power button. When it was starting up is when it started giving me the error message.

 

I doubt safe mode will work.

So, one of two things to try:

Boot to your xp install cd and try to access your recovery console.

From there, do a chkdsk /p

Or

Try a repair installation.

Though, you are using a laptop, most companies have recovery cds that wipe out the laptop.

I'd try to borrow a cd from a friend who has the same type of OS, then try to enter in the recovery console or do a repair install of your OS, using your key that came with your laptop (usually printed on the bottom of your laptop)

 

when I put in chkdsk /p

I get an eror message:

Invalid switch - /p

 

when I put in chkdsk /p

I get an eror message:

Invalid switch - /p

so I tried chkdsk \p an I got:

Volume Serial Number is 2A87-6CE1

1,457,664 bytes total disk space
1,428,992 bytes in 27 user files
28,672 bytes available on disk

512 bytes in each allocation unit
2,847 total allocation units on disk
56 available allocation units on disk

655,360 total bytes memory
552,016 bytes free

File not found

 

If a reboot doesn't work, then I'd try a repair install.

Unless some of the majorgeeks here can represent themseves!