About how much money will it take to bring it to the shop and fix ?

I cannot tell because I don’t know what’s wrong with the laptop.

My son has a Toshiba Satilite,and when you turn it on the toshiba logo will come on and do its thing..then it goes to nothing,.a black screen with a little curser in the left hand top corner…

This could be hard drive related failure.
1. Take a look at the laptop BIOS setup menu. Can you see the hard drive detected in the BIOS?
2. Listen for the hard drive sounds very closely when the laptop starts. Do you hear any unusual noises: clicking, grinding noise, etc…?
3. If the hard drive detected in the BIOS and spins normally, maybe it’s not making good connection with the motherboard. Try reconnecting the hard drive. Simply remove it from the laptop and install back in place. Test again.

window could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\windows\system32\config\system

It’s hard to tell what’s going on without testing the laptop. Could be bad memory module or corrupted software.

We don’t know what to do.. this message appears when we turn the computer on.can you help us.will we be able to recover our information

Here’s how you can recover personal information from the hard drive.
1. Remove the hard drive from the laptop.
2. Purchase an external USB enclosure for notebook hard drives. Make sure the purchase the correct type. It’s either SATA hard drive or IDE hard drive. Here’s the difference:
http://www.laptopparts101.com/hard-drive/
3. Install your hard drive into the enclosure and connect this enclosure to another working computer.

The external hard dive will be recognized automatically and you can access it as a regular hard drive through My Computer.

More detailed instructions here:
http://www.laptoprepair101.com.....enclosure/

After all data is backed up, install the hard drive back into the laptop and try reinstalling software from the recovery process. If there is nothing wrong with laptop hardware, it should fix your problem.

We don’t know what to do.. this message appears when we turn the computer on.can you help us.will we be able to recover our information

I have taken out the battery, hard drive and memory and replaced them one by one, with no change to the message. The BIOS seems fine, and no combination of memory sticks/slots seems to help, so I am left thinking it is a simple hard drive problem.

I would like to be able to check this but I have no external enclosure that takes a laptop drive. I have tried the disk check that the BIOS offers, and it doesn’t report any problem, but I would like to check it out using a boot disk with some more informative tools.

Unfortunately, I can’t persuade it to boot off either of two boot CDs I have made, both of which work fine on my desktop. I have checked the BIOS settings, and it should be booting from the optical drive first etc, but I just get the same problem as if I had no CD in there. I know that in the past it would fail to boot if I had a USB stick in (trying to find an OS on the USB), but now it does not do that either: could it be oblivious to anything but the hard drive?

Alternatively, is it likely that in this state the laptop will refuse to look at anything other than the official restore CD? I know I tossed this out when we moved house recently (won’t need that I thought…!), so any alternative to having to find a replacement would be great.

I have a problem regarding about my laptop the brand is acer. The problem with it it keeps rebooting itself. And before that it shows a black screen with some options like: last known good configuration acer safe mode I clicked on last good configuration but nothing it just rebooted again.

Does it give you any error message before rebooting?
First of all, I would check memory. It’s possible that one of the memory modules is bad. Try removing memory modules one by one, and test the laptop with only one module installed.

By the way, here’s how you can save files from the hard drive.

Thanks
Mark.