Help with windows error on new pc

Hi there,
We just built my husband a brand new pc recently. We bought all the parts brand new off of newegg. It worked great for 2 days and suddenly this morning when he tries to log on it loads into windows and then blue screen of death. It repeats it as we tried in vain to get the error codes because they disappeared too quick for us to read them. When i get home from work tonight it will only go through the loading screen for the motherboard and not even enter the windows loading screen before it reboots. We've tried unplugging it and leaving it for a few hours too.
The error message we did get was following file is missing or corrupt: windows/system32/config/system

We had only loaded the hdd drivers, windows, and 2 games onto it before the crash. Like I said- we had only had it assembled for 2 days.

The original copy of windows xp that we have will not even load from the cd so we can get into recovery. Is it possible our brand new hdd is dead or what else could it be? Is there anything I can try to fix it?
Drive is a seagate barracuda 7200.10 160gb
please help:cry

 

The Windows error is a problem with the Operating System.

You installed XP so you had "Boot from CD First" set in BIOS. Is that still the case?

Try unplugging the PC taking out the battery for a few minutes and rebooting with the XP CD in the drive.

 

Well last night we removed the new sata drive that would not load, even trying to do a fresh install of windows. We put in an old drive and the pc loaded windows and seems to be ok...though I havent tried doing much on it. So is my hdd dead?

 

I can't say whether the HD is dead or not. If the new drive is SATA and the old drive is IDE/PATA I would think the problem would lie in the loading of the third party drivers during install. F6 in the first minute of two of the Windows install.

Because you had it running for 2 days, it sounds like you did this fine once. I would try to completely reformat the SATA drive and do the reinstall. If your PC boots from the XP disc and you can't get the OS to install on the SATA drive then you may have a problem with the drive.

 

We're RMAing the drive back to the seller. Interesting thing I heard--ups drops a package on average 35 times during shipping. I'm guessing the hdd got dropped one too many times...