My Toshiba lap-top wont boot up (laptop, RAM, hard drive, bios)

[redwine]

I have a Toshiba laptop Satellite A135-S4527 and It wont boot up. After I turn it on a banner on the bottom comes up ans says "Windows is loading files" then it goes to a black screen that says "Microsoft Corporation" on the bottom of the screen" and then the screen goes black and stays there. I tried the recovery disc and a screen comes up and says
"Windows could not start because the system registry file is missing or corrupt"
What do I do?
How much does something like this cost to repair?

[harry chickpea]

Start by pressing the control key immediately after the BIOS loads. Select step by step startup and see if it gets into the startup process at all or find where it hangs.

What happened before the problem? Download something from the net? Loan the computer to a kid? Drop it?

I'd suspect a virus first, then hard drive failure if that wasn't the cause.

[J Arp]

Have you added more RAM? I added more RAM to one of my computers once and it did this. I am not exactly sure why and I tried different sticks of RAM and eventually the hard drive would corrupt again. I am stuck at 512 on that one. Re-installing windows would probably take care of it.

[redwine]

Originally Posted by harry chickpea

Start by pressing the control key immediately after the BIOS loads. Select step by step startup and see if it gets into the startup process at all or find where it hangs.

What happened before the problem? Download something from the net? Loan the computer to a kid? Drop it?

I'd suspect a virus first, then hard drive failure if that wasn't the cause.

I think might have slammed the lid down to hard once......thats it..

[harry chickpea]

Probably will be fine. Create a Boot disk and try to start it from that and see if you can find the directory structure of the C: drive.