The box is an Averatec laptop 711 series OEM XP Media Center. When I boot the message is windows\system32\config\system is missing or corrupt. Here's the kicker - I have ghost 10 and it seems to be working well enough, it sees my USB drive and I can locate files, but not well enough to find a recovery point on my usb drive. I just backed the system drive up yesterday hours before this crash. The files should be there, and it appears I can copy/paste, if (preferred option 1) I only knew what to move to repair the fault. Or (option 2) if I could get Ghost to recognize that I have the complete system partition cloned on a USB drive partition.
The least desireable solution is to reload via the restore disk that came with the laptop and then clone a slightly older backup made with MS. I did not get an XP CD-Rom with this unit, altho I have one for XP Pro from another machine, if that helps.
I'm open to what yall have to say.
js