[Home] XP Home crash missing or corrupt system file

[pcems medic]

I recently had a crash od my Laptop.
I use a Toshiba Satellite M35x-s149 with 512MB Ram, a 1500 Mhz CPU, and a 60GB hard drive. Running a OEM XP Home installation with SP2.

My wife was using the internet and it locked. She rebooted and came up to a black screen saying window file C:\windows\system32\config\system missing or corrupt. And the nightmare was on. After reading up I used an XP pro Cd i happen to have to boot to a Recovery Command Prompt. After attempting to edit a couple of registry files (system, config. etc) I rebooted and got the same error message, but this time when I rebooted to the Recovery prompt, I received a request for an administrator password and since it is an XP home OEM install I don't have one. So I couldn't find a way around that online. I finally decided to Load the XP pro (no valid Key to register) onto my hard drive but not over the old XP Home Just along side as a dual boot. That gave me a way to access the hard drive with out a password. Is there a around the administrator password into the recovery console?? The only way I could find was to download boot disk from Microsoft according to their site. That won't work on my laptop since it has no floppy drive. Eventually I removed the old registry files (5 in total) and copied the repair registry files into place. That let me boot to the original XP home installation and then I restored to a prior installation backup.
Was there an easier way, and I still can't boot to the recovery console for XP Home edition Even though I have now installed it as a Boot option it will only function under XP pro. The XP Home Console only ask for the unknown admin password? A second question topic- After installing the XP pro The wireless connection will not automatically set up. There is a wireless router setup for me to use and it still works under XP Home as it did but not under the new XP pro. Suggestions? I am trying to get access using IE 6.0 (SP2) 128bit or my AOL 9.0 ver. Thanks for anyones advice. from Todd. (PCEMS medic)

[ProfessorU]

It's against the rules for us to give you advice to work around passwords.

What you're trying to do, you don't need the password for anyway. You need to find the original XP home CD and do a repair. If you don't have the CD, you're much better off keeping XP pro installed anyway.

When you're back to operational, don't forget to do a backup to make this easier if it happens again!