hi, i'm running windows xp pro. a while back my system file in the config folder (windows/system32/config) corrupted, which i was eventually able to sort out. then a few weeks later the file went missing, once again i sorted this out. but then a few days after that i got the exact same problem, and i had to correct it using the files from the repair directory in windows, using the recovery console. again this happened, but luckily i used system restore, which seemed to rectify the problem. only 5 minutes ago i got the same problem - i wasnt sure whether the system file was missing, because i didn't let windows restart, what i did find was that i heard a bizarre scratching noise coming from my CPU, which seemed to repeat indefinitely. i had to use system restore again, but i am getting very annoyed with the state of my computer. any help is much appreciated. thank you.

Normaly when you get a bizare scratchy sound coming from the system it is the hard drive making that noise. As in the heads scraping across the platters or the platters are phsyically stuck. I would visit the manufactures web page that makes your hard drive and download their diag. utility and test the HDD's integrity, you also might want to run a full scan of the HDD within windows if you can get the system to stay up for that long but from what you have described, I would say faulty hard drive. Later, KTTD

hi, thanks for you reply, i tried to go to the dell web site, and i found a diag program for my hard drive, but it froze my floppy disk drive more than once. do you know of any other diagnostic utilities i could use, for either my hard drive or registry, although it does look like it's a HDD problem. thank you.

I'd worry about backing up the data you want to save before running any HDD diagnostics on the drive. If it's failing, every HDD I/O operation could be the last. Get the data off and then do some diagnostic work.