G
Guest
I set my XP machine to defrag my hard drive while I went to bed. In the morning, I found that the system was frozen showing only 6% was defragged. The neither the keyboard nor the mouse had any affect on waking the machine up. Everything was very dead. So I turned the machine off. Perhaps a huge mistake. In anycase, it came back up part way with the message "Following file missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM. Use original setup CDROM and select "r" to start repair"
Well, I put in the cd but the machine just returned to the same message. Any keyboard action at all caused a reboot. back to the same place. I tried many things including: moving the drive to another computer to offload all the data files (a 98SE machine). This worked but was tedious. So I have the data. I also looked for a startup floppy for my XP machine but I don't think I ever had one. Been so long I have forgotten. Since I couldn't get an XP one up, I tried my 98SE startup disk to see if I could see my C drive. It started up and I could see the drive OK. I ran the hard drive on the 98SE machine and used Norton Disnk Doctor to fix up any problems. That tokk over 16 hours!!!!! and apparently fixed some problems. However, it still behaved the same on my XP machine. So I changed my bios to try booting from the CD ROM. However, no matter what I do, it seems to find windows 98 somewhere in ram to start booting from. It will not boot from my CD rom. How can I get rid of teh windows 98 stuff and force it to the CD
Have I screwed the pooch so much that my only hope is a disk reformat? I will still have that windows 98 on bootup problem I think
Anyway, I'm sure open to some ideas to try. It's been a wasted weekend
Thanks for anything you can offer
Gord Pop
Well, I put in the cd but the machine just returned to the same message. Any keyboard action at all caused a reboot. back to the same place. I tried many things including: moving the drive to another computer to offload all the data files (a 98SE machine). This worked but was tedious. So I have the data. I also looked for a startup floppy for my XP machine but I don't think I ever had one. Been so long I have forgotten. Since I couldn't get an XP one up, I tried my 98SE startup disk to see if I could see my C drive. It started up and I could see the drive OK. I ran the hard drive on the 98SE machine and used Norton Disnk Doctor to fix up any problems. That tokk over 16 hours!!!!! and apparently fixed some problems. However, it still behaved the same on my XP machine. So I changed my bios to try booting from the CD ROM. However, no matter what I do, it seems to find windows 98 somewhere in ram to start booting from. It will not boot from my CD rom. How can I get rid of teh windows 98 stuff and force it to the CD
Have I screwed the pooch so much that my only hope is a disk reformat? I will still have that windows 98 on bootup problem I think
Anyway, I'm sure open to some ideas to try. It's been a wasted weekend
Thanks for anything you can offer
Gord Pop