Starting

The error you are receiving is indicating that the Windows Operating System settings cannot be located on your hard drive to complete the loading of Windows. There are several possible causes, starting with a hardware failure of the hard drive. Others could involve a corruption of the registry due to unknown causes.

The first thing to try is the F8 menu during boot (Start tapping F8 when you see the Gateway Splash Screen) and try to boot to the SAFE MODE. If that fails, boot to F8 again and select the Last Known Good option on the menu.

If that fails to boot to windows, then recovering the OS doesn't look to optimistic. Other options are bootcfg /rebuild to check and see if the boot.ini file is corrupted

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291980/en-us

and if that fails I suggest running diagnostics on the hard drive.

A longer shot at recovering the OS is what is known as a HIVE copy in the recovery console. This is essentially a system restore done manually in the recovery console, and is the last ditch effort before reinstalling Windows. Steps for Hive copy are at the bottom of this post:

http://dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_other&thread.id=210955