Unable to boot Windows XP

My old laptop is having problems booting up. When I tried to start it up normally, I got the message "Windows could not start because of an error in the software. Please report this problem as: load needed DLLs for kernel." Then I powered it down and tried to boot in Safe Mode, selecting the Windows XP option after choosing Safe mode, only to get the message "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM. You can attempt to repair this problem by starting Windows Setup using the original Setup CD-ROM. Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair." Next I tried Safe Mode again, but this time using the Windows Recovery Console option. The message I got this time was "The file cpqarray.sys could not be found. Press any key to continue." Pressing any key led to "Setup failed. Press any key to restart your computer."

I do have the Toshiba Recovery and Applications/Drivers CD that came with the machine, but I do not want to reinstall windows or format the hard drive because there's a lot of data and files that I can't lose. This is a Toshiba Satellite A100-ST2311. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

Easy one first - take out any USBs then take out the battery and disconnect the power. Hold the ON button down for maybe 30 seconds, then try booting.

 

Greetings, timzahm.

If GCWesq's suggestion doesn't pan out, do you have the capacity to burn CDs/DVDs?

 

I tried GCWesq's suggestion and it seemed like it got farther along in the boot process, but eventually got to a blue screen and immediately restarted. On the restart, it came to the menu with Safe Mode, Last Known Good, and Start Windows Normally, and I chose Safe Mode. Eventually again it came to a blue screen and restarted, and I let it boot normally, but the same thing happened again.

Caliban, I do have the ability to burn CDs.

 

I suggest trying to salvage your data before you go any further - looks as if you may have some major Windows corruptions.

Try booting to a Linux distro (Mint, Puppy and Ubuntu are all nice and easy). Download the .iso file, and burn that file as an image to a CD/DVD (ImgBurn and InfraRecorder are good free .iso burning programs if you don't already have one).

A quick tutorial for the image burning process using ImgBurn is located here.

Then boot to that disk, and run the OS as a live environment (in other words, don't install it - just run it from the optical drive). Once the Linux is able to mount your hard drive, you should be able to transfer the files to a USB device.

An added advantage to using this procedure is that you may be able to discern if you've got any hardware issues that may be causing your problems.

 

Mint and Ubuntu didn't work for me -- it would boot partially, for Ubuntu I even got the screen with the option between 'try it' and 'install' but then ended up at a black screen. Puppy did start up and I could hook up a hard drive via USB. However, Puppy showed the My Documents folder as empty. It seemed to show files in other locations, and I could copy those to the external hard drive.

Is there a way to reinstall Windows without losing any data? Any other thoughts on getting the files off through linux?

 

To follow up on my previous message, I went into Puppy's console program and navigated to the My Documents directory. I gave the dir command, and it came back with "dir: reading directory .: Input/output error". As with the navigator, the console was able to display the contents of other folders using the dir command.

 

You might try booting to a stand-alone Recovery Console .iso, see if you can get by that 'cpqarray.sys' error.

XP RC .iso.

 

I was able to boot to the windows recovery console. I went in through the repair option and got to the dos prompt, tried the fixmbr command but it didn't seem to have any effect. Then I ran chkdsk and it got 25% completed before giving me the error message "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems." Should I try booting to the recovery console again and choosing the setup option? Will that erase any files (pictures, documents, etc.)? Any other suggestions?