XP wont startup - corrupt/missing system file

[Guest]

I built a system for my brother using a Gigabyte GA-K8Npro mobo and an AMD64
3200+ processor with 1Gb ram. It's been running fine for the past 2 years
except that yesterday he got the message " windows couldn't start because the
following file is missing or corrupt, \windows\system32\config\system"

This mobo supports RAID 0+1 using dedicated EIDE jacks seperate from the
primary/secondary master/slave IDE ports. So I have (4) 80gig Maxtor HD's, 2
set up in striped config and the other 2 are set up as a "mirror" of the
first 2. This is all seen as only one Array and is supposed to give speed
writing to stripped drives as well as redundancy with the mirrored drives in
case the stripped drives fail. This doesn't seem to be working as planned.


Booting to the original XP CD-ROM, I try to enter either safe mode or safe
mode with c-prompt and still get the same missing/corrupt msg. I hit F8 to
start in safe mode & inserted the RAID driver disc and hit "R" for repair.
It then asks what windows directory to fix. Before I can select the only 1
listed, or just after selecting the only one, the computer powers off on its
own. I then restart and it shuts down again at the same spot.

Any way to fix the corrupted/missing system file other than the "Repair"
function that doesn't want to work?

Thanks for any assistance.

 

[DatabaseBen]

as a suggestion:
maybe you can temporarily disconnect/disable the physical raid drives.
then you might be able to boot with the setup cd, select new install, point
to the installation on the harddisk and select yes to repair it.

if by chance you cannot repair the installation, i would
install a new o.s. on a different partition as an emergency
o.s. Once you get somekind of an o.s. functional, you
will have an additional tool to work on the former o.s.

if neither one works for you, then make an emergency boot cd
from another pc. When you boot with it you should be
able to get access to the file system on the harddrive.

after the o.s. is functional, you can replan the raids....