Windows has killed itself AGAIN!

sjt269

sjt269

sjt269

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11 Dec 2004
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Turned the PC on earlier, played some games, and all was well. I figured I'd better make a start on setting up a new wireless network, so I turned the PC off and went to plug in the network card. Then I read the instructions, and saw that actually I had to install the software first. So, without having touched the innards of the PC, I turned the PC back on again, only to be confronted by an error message screen.


'C:\windows\system32\config\system' is apparently missing or corrupt. How, I don't know. It advises me to use the recovery console to repair the file, but I can't for the life of me figure out exactly how I'm meant to repair it via the recovery console.

Any ideas? I tried a few things and screwed up the PC even further, but I can fix what I've done so long as I get this corrupt file back.


This is the third time in a space of weeks that bits of my PC have become 'corrupt' for no reason whatsoever, and I'm getting slightly suspicious/worried that something's wrong with it.



Thanks in advance
tTz
 
tTz said:
This is the third time in a space of weeks that bits of my PC have become 'corrupt' for no reason whatsoever, and I'm getting slightly suspicious/worried that something's wrong with it.
Click to expand...

If this is the third time that something similar has happened then theres definitely something breaking down.
First of all remove every cable and card from all sockets and plugs and reinsert them. This won't solve the problem you have now but could solve the problem when you get up and running again.
If its corrupted data then your first call could be your hard drive on its way out.
 
I know, but the HDD is only a year old, and it's a good make (Hitachi). I know that's no guarantee of longevity though, so I'm definitely going to beg, borrow or steal to get another HDD to make some pretty hefty backups of the stuff I've got just now though...think I may have an old unformatted 10Gb drive in a cupboard somewhere. I've been having really bad luck with hard drives for the last year or so. :(

But at the moment, getting back into the PC is my priority, so I'll concentrate on backups after I've got something to back up. :o
 
I'm afraid there isn't a 'system' file on the installation disk so it isn't a case of just transferring that file over to your hard drive with DOS commands :(

However, XP installation has a REPAIR facility that works quite well.
When the installation disk first loads up it gives you the option to REPAIR but this is not the one you want to click.
Instead keep clicking as though you are going to do a normal install and eventually you will come to another screen with a REPAIR option.
This will re-install XP but keep all your old settings.

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm for more help.
 
Oh, so the recovery console thingy is the wrong one to use then? Looking at the page you linked to now, I'll give it a go and report back (hopefully from my own PC!). :)
 
Meh. I tried the repair reinstall thing, and it gets as far as rebooting to finish the reinstall before it says something along the lines of 'File "asms" is needed from the XP Home Edition CD' and asks me to type in the path to the file. I've tried that, but every time I click 'Ok' absolutely nothing happens. I've tried a dozen different variations using capital letters etc, and changing the path from globalroot\device\cdrom1\I386 that it sets to as default to E:\I386 and similar things, but still nothing happens.

Help me out here guys, there's stuff on this PC I really need access to pretty sharpish. :(
 
1 - Take the drive out and put it as a slave in a mates PC and then save your files.

2 - Do a full installation but don't format the hard drive
 
Is that the only option? :(


I can do it, but it involves me stealing my brother's PC for a while, and he'll not thank me for it. Addiction to evilbay. ;)


Ach, I might as well...I suppose I can take it for a while before he goes into withdrawal symptoms, and I'll be finished before he goes cold turkey. Dunno how long it'll take to copy all my files across (there are a lot of them) but if it's my only option, then it's my only option. I'll count myself lucky if I get the files back, no matter how tortous the process of recovery might be. :o
 
tTz said:
Is that the only option? :(
Click to expand...

Option 2 - Do a full installation but don't format your drive.

Option 2 will delete your Windows directory and then install Windows again leaving all your files intact as long as you didn't save them in the Windows directory.
 
What sort of system have you got? I used to get this regularly on my old Iwill KK266 mobo with a 1.3GHz athlon, never managed to solve why it was doing it and got rid of the system in the end.

You can sort of recover by booting into the recovery console and having a look in the config folder to see if there's a backup of the file SYSTEM but the only versions I ever found was 1 that was used during the early installation stages which meant that if you copied the file over XP would load but then go through the tail end of it's installation.

In the end I used to build the system then in recovery console make a backup of the files in the config folder so that I could recover.
 
dmpoole said:
Option 2 - Do a full installation but don't format your drive.

Option 2 will delete your Windows directory and then install Windows again leaving all your files intact as long as you didn't save them in the Windows directory.
Click to expand...


Ah, thought that was Step 1 and Step 2 rather than seperate options. :o

I've just begun the backup process onto my brother's PC (he's away out playing golf, so I've got it for the night, but Doctor Who is coming on soon, and I can't miss that!) which is going to take quite a while. I'm putting everything in a passworded rar file (don't want him snooping in my files, plus I think it'll be easier to manage as a .rar than as thousands of seperate files) just now. Later on, I'll reinstall without formatting (I'm sure I tried that before and it wiped all the files, but if I've got the backup, then I figure I'll be safe enough trying it) and see what happens.

Keep your fingers crossed for me. :p



IAmATeaf said:
What sort of system have you got? I used to get this regularly on my old Iwill KK266 mobo with a 1.3GHz athlon, never managed to solve why it was doing it and got rid of the system in the end.
Click to expand...


It's a Pentium 4 2.2Ghz Northwood on an Asus P4S533 motherboard, and damn, I'm impressed I remembered that without looking it up.:p

As you can tell, it's an old-ish system, so I'll be upgrading it later on this year (finances allowing) so I'll hopefully leave problems like this behind. I dunno what's causing this, or how to put an end to it, so I'll just be thankful I can manage to keep my files.


30 mins to go on the backup, apparently. That means I can give my brother his PC back before he gets back from the golf, reinstall Windows on mine, then steal his PC back again tomorrow when he's golfing again (team match) and get all my files back, with minimal inconvenience to him. I, on the other hand, am going to lose valuable revision time. Meh. Can't be helped, I suppose. :(


Thanks - I'll report back if it all goes smoothly. If it doesn't, I might just throw myself in front of a train and end it all, so if you don't hear from me again, you'll know it didn't work. :p
 
tTz said:
30 mins to go on the backup, apparently.
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Hours. 30 hours. :o


Need to trim it down a little, methinks.



Or...copy my brother's System files onto my hard drive? Worth a try, I reckon. I'll give it a go.



:edit:

Well that bright idea didn't work...can't copy system files, because they're in use by the system. :o
 
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Energize said:
Just run chkdsk.
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Oh give me some credit, I'm not stupid, I tried that. ;)

Needless to say, it didn't actually work. :o


Neither did the backups onto the other PC, it was taking too long...my fault for trying to put it all in a .rar file, I think. I set up a small 8Gb HDD in my PC, installed Windows, and ran my old HDD as a slave drive, and I've got some of my stuff backed up. If I reinstall and lose everything, then I'll end up losing most of my photos still, since the HDD was too small to fit the photos on as well.

Thanks for the link firewallblocked, I'm looking at it now. :)
 
tTz said:
Well that bright idea didn't work...can't copy system files, because they're in use by the system. :o
Click to expand...

Norton Ghost.

Make a clone of his hard drive and with luck you might be able to boot into Safe Mode
 
Tried the corrupt registry recovery guide from a few posts up, but it's not working. I got a little bit through it, then realised I could use a .txt file to go through all the commands for me, to save me typing each one out (I'm lazy, so sue me) for several parts of the guide, so I went and got the .txt file and put it onto the HDD, and now when I boot into the recovery console, it's asking for an Administrator password. The thing is, it's never done this before, and there is no password. Leaving it blank, or just pressing space, gives me an invalid password error, and I've tried anything I'd have made up myself. It's a phantom password. :o




Norton Ghost, do I need to buy that? I'll away and check it out on their website, ta.


:edit:

£40 for Norton Ghost, and no way to borrow it from anyone (no one I know has it, afaik) or trial it first. For £40, I'd be better off buying a new HDD, installing Windows onto it, backing up my data, formatting the current HDD, and ending up with twice the space and all the data.

That plan had already ocurred to me, but unfortunately the Edinburgh marathon is on today, so a lot of roads are closed, so a journey to purple-shirt-land could take a very long time, and buying from OcUk won't get me anything before about Thursday.

Gah. I hate computers sometimes.
 
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sounds like a hardware problem

do a memtest
hard drive test

ultimatebootcd.com has them

also, could be power supply on the way out
 
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