Windows File Corrupt

[a7med_360]

Hey im running vaio AR21s widows xp mce, today i restarted my computer afer istallig live update for my Norton, and as the laptop was booting up i got the boot options(which is a first) it gave me the safe mode options etc....but whe i chose any of them (boot widows normally was my main goal here) i received an error msg saying

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\Windows\System32\Cofig\System"

and i have so much important data on the the driver, i was going to do a system recovery but was worried everything might get deleted.

PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!

sorry for any problems reading what im writing im using my old DELL laptop and the key "N" does not work properly

[davemee]

I'm amazed that the most productive suggestion, so far, has been to *pirate* software.

How can sony ship multi-thousand pound machines and be so cheap they can't include proper OS CDs, which would work around these problems? How can HP ship machines at half the price, half the spec, and still ship full, working, legal, system disks?

Yeah, I go on and on about this. You're not shocked by this kind of thing, until it affects you.