hello everybody! im new in the community and hope to upgrade my own knowledge with your tech articles and enthusiasm to help others. Im not a guru, but i learn fast. I need your inmediate help.

i have an old presario r3000 series which is in perfect condition although very slow. i recently added one g to the original 256 mb ram installed. it worked fine the first time after the upgrade, but then windows would'nt start and showed the following message:

win cld not strt cause the following file is missing or corrupt:
\windows\system32\config\system

it then aked to try repair the file using the original setup cd-rom. i never tried repairing the os before. when prompted to choose between repair and setup, i chose the option of repairing, but the list of commands i get when i enter help is mostly unfamiliar to me, attrib, batch, cls, diskpart, listsvc, etc . ive gone through most of them, but i dont know what to do next. i had not backed up my hard disk so i am afraid i will lose everything if i choose to setup xp.

can anyone help me repair the os?

It's the second R prompt, refer to these tutorials: (please choose your Windows version)

Microsoft's Windows XP Professional Repair Install step by step
http://www.windowsxpprofessional.win...pair/part3.htm

Microsoft's Windows XP Home Repair Install step by step
http://www.windowsxphome.windowsrein...pair/part3.htm

Thank you Kimsland. Im beginning to see why I could not get the system repaired by myself. I followed the link to "windowsxphome.windowsrein...pair/part3.htm". I had already been through those steps, but after the license agreement, f8, the screen shown is completely different from the one in part 2 of the reinstall process.

The window i get looks like this:

"The following list shows the existing partitions and unpartitioned space on this computer.

Use the UP and DOWN ARROW keys to select an item in the list.

To set up Windows XP on the selected item, press ENTER.
To create a partition in the unpartitioned space, press C.
To delete the selected partition, press D.

______________________________________________________________________
57232 MB Disc 0 at ID 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]

C: Partition1 (Presario) [NTFS] 57224 MB (25947 MB free)
Unpartitioned space 8 MB
______________________________________________________________________"

What am I doing wrong?

I nearly answered that incorrectly, I had to re-read what you said, and go to the Part2 (on the part3 page of course!)

Anyway, on some Repair installations you will not see the second R prompt
Hopefully you have waited for me to reply, and you haven't proceeded just to press enter.

I'll just wait for your response for an hour or so (doing other stuff)

Hi everybody:

I have not been able to resolve the problem. I followed the Repair Tutorial, but after I enter F8 to accept the license agreement, the screen I get is not the one shown in the tutorial, the one asking to select the OS I wish to repair. So I miss the rest of the repair process.

What I get is a screen asking me to create or delete partitions in order to install XP.

I'm not really getting an option to repair the os, only to install it. What can I do?

You're back (so soon? )

Try this thread:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic98544.html

Thank you Kimsland!
I'm away from the computer, but will let you know if it worked later.