File missing or corrupt

My son's Dell inspiron 910 won't boot up.When he turns it on he gets the following message,"windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:\system32\ntoskrnl.exe. please re install a copy of the above file" Trouble is the notebook/laptop dosen't have a disc drive. And no matter what key he presses it shuts down.Any ideas? thank you.

This is worth a try:

Reboot the computer but start tapping the F8 key to get to safe mode.

If you can get there… select Safe Mode with Command Prompt

type sfc /scannow and hit enter.

Hopefully it will find a good copy of the file from the cache.

Thanks Tom but i've tried that.As soon as i press any key the notebook shuts down.

What version of windows is it? Do you have another computer with the same version of the operating system? Do you have a USB drive (thumb drive)?

Thank you for your time. It's Windows xp Home edition. No and no.

Bummer… I'm out of ideas.

Would the simple but expensive way to solve this,is to buy an external disc drive? Or is there a way i can use my driver on my PC?

Do you have a windows XP home disk?

If so, the simple… fairly inexpensive($10?), thing to try would be for you to get a thumb drive, install a Linux distro on it and see if we can get your system to boot to Linux. If we can, then we can expand a new ntoskrnl.exe file onto the thumb drive and use it to copy to your hard drive. If this corrupted file is the only problem, that should get you going again.

Now you have frazzled my brain! Thanks for trying to help me mate but i think i'll get an external disc drive.