I had my computer in standby mode for a few hours. When I hit the space bar to wake it up, a blue screen popped up and said "bad_system_config_info" and told me to restart to see if it helped; if not, disable BIOS memory or something like that. I restarted the computer, a black screen came on and it gave me the option to go into safe mode, start windows normally and so forth. I tried restarting windows in safe mode. got into windows and tried system restore. system restore didn't solve the problem-- I still got the black screen every time I reboot. I tried Checkdisk to scan for bad sectors. I managed to finish Checkdisk for my C: drive that contains all the system files. (I have 2 other partitions for storage) Windows repaired something. but when I tried doing the same for E and F drives the computer restarted itself during phase 4 and 5.After that I either got the black screen with different choices for booting up or the blue screen. It sometimes told me to insert the Windows setup CD to repair because the file SYSTEM32/CONFIG/system is corrupt or damaged. I tried using the setup CD to boot up but it said it could not complete the process. I think the error code was 4. Can someone tell me what's going on and how I can solve the problem? Do I have to format my harddrive?

Try different RAM or remove extra segments if applicable. Try the drive in another PC if possible. Remove all the accesory cards(sound video NIC etc). I just went throught a very similar situation and after swapping out every single hard component, I was left with a bad motherboard. Changed that and all was well. Jimi_l

Angela, here's your fix. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307545