Gateway with XP start up/recovery problems

[bignum50]

Well first of all this is my first post and let  me say I wish I would have found this site well before now. It appears as there are lots of helpful people who are willing to donate their time to help other people and that is awesome!

Now to the problem. I have a Gateway laptop purchased in 2005. It  has Windows XP with SP 2 I believe. Its had some problems due to spending most of it's life in Iraq when I was overseas. I took it to Bestbuy as I purchased a warranty and they installed a new motherboard, screen, keyboard, and a few other things. So they basically gave me a new computer. 

One day it died and would not turn back on. I used the system recovery that is on the machine (F11) and got it back up and running. It worked fine for several months and now im back to the same problem. However now after I used the system recovery (the one where it does not erase your data) it starts and goes into disk checking then into setup. It says setup is not complete and restarts. The first time it said a windows file was corrupt and setup couldn't be completed. 

It will not start in safe mode due to setup not working in safe mode.
Sorry for the long post and I appreciate any answers.

[patio]

First off Welcome Aboard ! !
If you can determine the manuf. of the hard drive i would suggest DLoading and running their Free diagnostics on that hard drive...
Sometimes it will be shown in Device Manager if you right clik the listed HDD and select Properties.
The diagnostics file will be used to create a bootable CD...you may have to do this on another machine.
Run the long test overnite and post back with the results.
The less you use the drive right now the better if we want to save your data but is sounding like a drive problem so let's start there...

[bignum50]

Thanks for the response..
The computer won't get past start up when it tries to run the set up as it was recently recovered. I can get to the bios settings though. Would i be able to determine the manufacturer of the hard drive from there?
By the way when I try running from last known configuration that worked i get the message: cannot run due to the following file being corrupt
\window\system32\config\system

Another question, i don't have the original windows CD that came with the computer but I read on here that if i had one i would be able to repair the files? where could i get a windows CD? EBay? i am guessing i would need an authentic one with a COA

[patio]

You can simply borrow a XP CD as long as the version and Service packs match to facilitate a repair....I.E. if you are running XP Pro with Service Pack2 that's the CD you will need.
XPHome will not repair XPPro and vice versa...

Repair Install of XP

I suggest reading it thru to become familiar paying special attention to the warnings and then printing out a reference copy...
Done correctly all your Programs and Data will be intact...done incorrectly your stuff is gone but you will wind up with a clean install of XP.

In answer to your other question some BIOS's will report what manuf. the HDD is ...
Let us know.