Corrupt windows files

[Jobos]

This morning a teacher bought in his machine from home that refuses to start. It’s a xp pro box and the boot up error says “Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM”

 

I booted with my emergency cd and copied over the files from the restore folder. The machine is now working ok and I can’t understand why this keeps happening as this is the second time he has had this same problem and both times I have fixed it by copying the restore files over.

 

I can’t see anything wrong with the machine, what should I be looking for?

[sharkster]

have you checked it for viruses? if you have it could be that the hard drive is on its way out and starting to corrupt. try running an intensive drive checkin util.

[mac_shinobi]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545