I have a computer that receives the infamous message "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt C:\windows\system32\config\system" when booted. I've Googled the problem and tried all of the solutions, however, I can not resolve the problem. I have an external hard drive and would like to extract files from the corrupt hard drive (if possible) to another computer via a hard drive external enclosure. Whenever I put the corrupt hard drive into the external enclosure, my other computer picks up the hard drive, however, it is only picking up 622M of 3.87 GB. The hard drive is 80GB. The partition that it is picking up is the recovery partition. Is there a way that I can bring up the partition that has all of the stored information?

What happened prior to all of this? Some details about the machine could be helpful as well.