Lappy won't boot? Help

[Duke Atreides]

My wife has a Toshiba Satellite 1135-S125.

 

This is the third time we have gotten this error, the previous two times I just used the restore discs and started over. However I thought there MUST be a better solution that reformatting the HDD.

 

This particular time my wife had the thing on the couch for a long time and some error came up asking her to restart. I do not know what error it was but since then whenever we stry to start it it POSTS, then goes blank screen, if we wait 5 minutes something does come up which says:

 

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or currupt:

<Windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe.

Please reinstall a copy of the above file.

 

I have tried using the Windows recovery with a SP2 disc, that does nothing. My wife has like 10 gigs of music on this laptop and really does not want to lose it, is there something we can do to fix this that does not involve using the restore discs or reformatting?

[steve burnell]

don't think your going to be able to save this without using the recovery disc's, what you could do though is get an external 2.5" caddy and hook it into another computer to get the files off ( if not password protected account), slap it back in the tosh and format

[Nemo]

When you boot off the Windows CD and go to the recovery console type in the admin password and then type:

 

expand d:\i386\ntoskrnl.ex_ c:\windows\system32

 

If it prompts you to overwrite the file, answer Yes.