BSOD Crash on Toshiba Laptop startup

[Mad4Sax2]

My girlfriend's Toshiba laptop suddenly refused to boot up, crashing to the Blue Screen of Death right before the log-in screen appears. I've tried booting into safe mode, VGA, revert to last working configuration, and any other options on the F8 menu with no success. It crashes at the exact same time every boot, regardless of the option selected. The message on the BSOD is the following:

STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
/SystemRoot/System32/ComFig/SOFTWARE
or its log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete.
Contact your system administrator or technical support group for further
assistance.

Does anyone know how to fix this error so I can get her computer to boot up again?

She's running a Toshiba Satellite A45-S151 laptop with P4 and Windows XP.

Thanks for any help.

 

[cprince]

Your hard drive might be failing. Boot from the XP installation disk and go to the the Recovery Console. At the C:\Windows> prompt, type chkdsk c: /p

 

[robisbell]

get The Ultimate Boot CD and run memtest86+ and the hdd manufacturers diagnostics from the cd.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

[Laputa]

It's likely a bad hard drive. If you have a spare drive to play with, you can load the OS and find out.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: cprince
Your hard drive might be failing. Boot from the XP installation disk and go to the the Recovery Console. At the C:\Windows> prompt, type chkdsk c: /p

It's most likely a problem with a slight corruption in the filesystem - not a drive failure, but a minor filesystem issue.

The above suggestion re: chkdsk is the best first thing to try.

MS also has an article on how to fix this if it is more than slight corruption - have you googled this from site:support.microsoft.com? See my web page for details on how to switch the registry if not.