XP boot up problems

[Guest MrQwest]

Morning all!

I bought my wife an Advent 4211 (the rebadged wind) for xmas last year and it has worked fine up until last week. The laptop wasn't plugged into the mains and the battery died. When we rebooted it, it said it couldn't boot due to an error (something to do with a missing file in \windows\system32\config\system).

When it happened, i couldn't boot into Windows but I could boot into "the Tech Guys Recovery tool" What a pile of poo that is!

Anyway, cut a long story short, the Tech guys recovery partition is based on Vista. When you try to fix your unbooting XP, the Tech Guys Recovery (TGR) tool crashes. When you reboot your netbook it says that the \boot\bcd is corrupt! Now the BCD is vista's new way of doing the old boot.ini thing. Problem is, I'm running XP on my 4211.

So the only help it gives you is to insert your vista installation CD (!) and repair.

So I followed a couple of pages on the net and created a bootable vista install on a usb stick. I booted that up & went to repair... however it can't find a vista hard drive to repair (because it's XP!) so can't repair anything!

Sooo, i created a bootable linux install on a usb stick (ubuntu if anyone cares), grabbed ms-sys (linux application to create windows boot records) and re-created my MBR for windows so it can boot into xp. This was done successfully. But upon restarting my 4211, it still says my \boot\bcd file is knackered.

The only way I can get around this \bcd error is by fixing it in vista - but vista can't see a vista installation to fix so i'm going round & round in circles and I'm hoping someone here may have come across the same thing and can help me out!?

At the moment, when i boot up, i get the advent screen and then a Windows Boot Manager screen saying:

windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be teh cause. To fix the problem:

1) Insert your windows installation disc and restart your computer.

2) choose your language settings and then click Next

3) Click repair your computer.

If you do not have this disc, contact your system admin or computer manufacture for assistance.

FILE: \boot\BCD

Status: 0xc0000098

Info: The windows boot configuration data file does not contain a valid OS entry.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Cheers :)