cannot start up windows becuase system 32?

[bsxiong]

[Gecko]

Is this the message?
Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

If so then yes you can recover the system from this.
Microsoft has an article explaining step by step how to recover from the corrupted registry
The article can be found

[o0obrian0o0]

I ran into this problem recently and the harddrive ended up being no good. However these are the steps i took to recover from that error. I inserted the windows disk and ran an emergency repair then i was able to get to windows. after that i ran the Regfix tool from microsoft.