Not your average "windows could not start" problem
djshowdown
London
I have a serious problem.
Upon returning to my pc, my screen was blank and the monitor had switched to standby mode. It seemed nothing was responding so I rebooted the computer via the reset switch.
The computer would not boot at all in fact my monitor was showing no activity at all. That along with the fact that there was a strange sound coming from my pc (like a hard drive spinning up then stopping repeatedly) caused me to diagnose that my hard drive had simply died (it is about 6 years old!)
So I turned the pc off and ordered a hard drive, a bit hasty I know but this is my main machine and downtime is not an option.
I turned my machine on and I get the "Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM " error
As I usually do when I have any pc related problem, I jumped straight on to Icrontic and had a nose around. I decided to try Thrax's 8 step recovery guide for XP.
Here's the strange part.
My system drive on this computer is C: and it isn't a multiboot system. The only installation recovery could find however is labelled as being on the D: drive!
I previously discussed this with some members in a thread when I was attempting (unsuccessfully) to dual boot this system but could not resolve it.
Now it appears to have really messed me up.
Basically I ran Thrax's guide substituting C: with D: and got all the way through fine. The only thing that didn't seem to want to work was the chkdsk command.
I am completely stumped with this.
What are my options?
I am going to take delivery of the new hard drive on Monday and had readied myself for a fresh boot anyway but I really want to get into this old installation so I can make backups of things like my thunderbird and firefox settings etc
Please help, I'm completely lost!
Upon returning to my pc, my screen was blank and the monitor had switched to standby mode. It seemed nothing was responding so I rebooted the computer via the reset switch.
The computer would not boot at all in fact my monitor was showing no activity at all. That along with the fact that there was a strange sound coming from my pc (like a hard drive spinning up then stopping repeatedly) caused me to diagnose that my hard drive had simply died (it is about 6 years old!)
So I turned the pc off and ordered a hard drive, a bit hasty I know but this is my main machine and downtime is not an option.
I turned my machine on and I get the "Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM " error
As I usually do when I have any pc related problem, I jumped straight on to Icrontic and had a nose around. I decided to try Thrax's 8 step recovery guide for XP.
Here's the strange part.
My system drive on this computer is C: and it isn't a multiboot system. The only installation recovery could find however is labelled as being on the D: drive!
I previously discussed this with some members in a thread when I was attempting (unsuccessfully) to dual boot this system but could not resolve it.
Now it appears to have really messed me up.
Basically I ran Thrax's guide substituting C: with D: and got all the way through fine. The only thing that didn't seem to want to work was the chkdsk command.
I am completely stumped with this.
What are my options?
I am going to take delivery of the new hard drive on Monday and had readied myself for a fresh boot anyway but I really want to get into this old installation so I can make backups of things like my thunderbird and firefox settings etc
Please help, I'm completely lost!
0
Comments
You need to hook the drive up to another PC as an external and get a look at what's going on with the partitions. Nothing can happen until that's done.
Grab that CD, burn it and boot it. If the hard drive isn't completely thrashed it should let you access it and get your data off of it... It's a live CD Linux distribution but it's pretty easy to use. It should allow you to burn your data to disk or move it to a USB drive. Install the new drive when you get it, put a fresh Windows install on it, restore your data and if all goes well take a hammer to the old trashed drive and toss it.
Got the new hard drive coming tomorrow so it's cool.
Thanks guys