windows/sytem32/config/system corrupt

I have an athlon 1800xp set-up with 40Gb hard drive with three partitions 1) c:/win 98 (5Gb), 2) d:/Win XP (5Gb) and 3) e:/My documents. Recently I rebooted picked the XP op sys and I had the following message: windos/system32/config/system file is corrupt or missing. Reboot with xp disk and press R or something like that. Obviously because there are two op systems on there I can get into the d:/ but don’t know what to do, would it be possible to just copy the content of this folder into the directory and restart as normal? Any suggestions would be most welcome!