Alrighty. This is my brother's computer, and I would really like to get this working enough to back up files. Of course he never backs up files, and apparently there are some horribly important files he needs for school so he told me I cannot just do a full reinstall.

The problem is that when I try to boot it I get the error:
"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"

I tried to fix this through the recovery console with the solution posted on Microsoft's website and other places on the web, but I can't get past the beginning steps, as when I type:
" copy c:\windows\system32\config\system c:\windows\tmp\system.bak " it tells me that it can't find any such file to copy. This seems to me like bad, bad news.

I can't do a repair reinstall because I receive no option to do a repair, just a full reinstall. I looked around for solutions to that and nothing seemed to do anything. Still no repair option.

His computer is under service contract at Best Buy but they told us that all they would do is a full reinstall, which I can do. He asked them to back up his files but they told him it would be $100 and no guarantee they could even retrieve them.

Is there any hope here? It seems like the system file is absolutely gone. Is it worth the money to see if Best Buy can get the files off? Should I just reinstall everything?

Thanks! I promise I have searched the internet up and down for a solution or I wouldn't be asking.

If anyone has brilliant ideas I'd still like to hear them, but I am currently downloading Knoppix so I can theoretically get the important files off the hard drive and then to a full reinstall. Yay for not paying $100!

If you can take his hard drive out and put it in another machine as a secondary (slave) drive you can burn his data to Disc, or USB storage device (flash drive).
$100.00 huh? Wow am I under paid.
You can also use a linux based OS (like puppy linux) to retrieve the data.