Help! Windows won't boot up, and I need to get some files off of it.

Dell (forgot the number, don't really use this computer, mainly daughter and wife do). A couple of years old...

Windows XP, haven't loaded SP2 yet, but pretty much all patches are up-to-date. Have had the CD for a while, just haven't had time...

300Mhz? P3 or P4

20 G hard drive

256M RAM

Sorry, as soon as wife gets home, I can get the rest of the computer's details...

First off, I'm not real sure of myself when messing with computers. I know how to properly load software, and upgrades, avoid spyware/viruses, etc. I amd mainly a user, not a programmer or modder or anything. So bear with me.

Anyway, without asking me, the wife loaded an update from Microsoft, something she NEVER does, but the little blinking icon just got the better of her. She did this cold, without backing anything up or making sure that there was a good save point before loading the update. So, naturally, something got hosed up during the load.

On top of that, she tried to restart the computer when it started acting funny, which apparently made the messed-up version the last good known version. So that mode of recovery is out.

Can't start in safe mode. I can get to the setup screen (F8), but it doesn't do me any good. The other setup screen (F2) will come up also, but I haven't reset anything in it, except to set the CD as first choice for booting, per a help sheet I DL'ed from Microsoft.

Anyway, I don't really care about most anything on it except for two or three documents in my area. And some pictures that my daughter JUST uploaded off her camera but hadn't had a chance to back up on CD. And some documents she had for school that she'd LIKE to save, but can live without (so she says). My wife says she can lose everything in her areas.

So what happens is I can boot from the CD to the restore console (looks like DOS), I can dig around in files (daughter's pics and docs and my docs are all still there), but I can't do anything with them.

If I could write to a floppy (yes, it has a floppy drive) I could pull the files off. But, in what seems a rather stupid limitation (to me, anyway), you can't write TO a floppy while in that mode.

So I guess what I'm asking is there any way to get those files off the computer? After that, I'll just wipe the disk and reload everything.

The only message that I've seen is: "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \windows\system32\config\system"

Digging around in the fies shows that the system file is there, and is a rather large file, but I have no way of knowing if it's simply a large corrupt file or what. Can it be restored? Or is there something I've missed?


Sorry if this is pretty disjointed...

 

You want to follow the instructions in this MS Article:

How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting

 

Thanks! I searched and searched there and that particular page never came up... Sound exactly like what I need.

Probably didn't come up because of my poor spelling or something...

I'll let you know Monday (or sooner from home) if this works.