An iPod installation screwed my Win machine..

I hate to be the negative guy when it comes to iPods because simply enough they look amazing. My first encounter though wasn't good, in fact it was quite damaging to my windows setup and ever since I tried to install my buddy's iPod on my machine all hell broke loose. What it left me with was a boot sequence that gave the message " A file is missing or corrupt in windows\system32\config\system , use original windows cd and type r for recovery ". A few hours later I managed to get my pc to work again. If I was a novice I would be cursing' at iPods for the rest of my life. I know it's a million things that could possibly go wrong and that it might not even be the iPod's fault but ask yourselves whom would you blame since it was the setup I did and after the request for a restart my machine would stop booting up.