For everyone's information:
Here's a follow up to my original post. I searched on Microsoft's Knowledge
Base and found article 307545: How to Recover from a Corrupted Registry That
Prevents Windows XP from Starting. It's quite involved but it worked and I'm
up and running again. As Peter said in his reply to my original post, it is
one of XP's registry files and it was corrupted.

This was my last resort. I tried booting from the last known good
configuration and safe mode from the boot menu and neither worked. I wanted
to share what I learned with the members of PCBUILD in case anyone has the
same problem you won't have to do as much searching as I did.

Dennis Thiel



----- Original Message -----

Hello Everyone,

This morning my dual boot XP Pro/Win98 machine gave me an error on boot up
that says Windows can't start because a file is missing or corrupted. It
tells me to start the recovery console from the CD. The path and filename
that is corrupted is C:\windows\system32\config\system. There is a  file
named system in that folder with no extension. When I searched on the CD for
system it showed several compressed files in the I386 folder named system,
but all had extensions. Is this system file without an extension created
upon installation of XP? Is it possible for me to recover it? Can I copy
this file from another XP machine to mine and would it work on my system?

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