Hard Drive Issues Preventing XP Load

[Guest]

MSFT has to come up with a way to load a disk utility similar to chkdsk to
attempt to corrupt bad drive sectors, etc. On my machine I see the following
message at boot, "windows\system32\config\system is missing or corrupted". I
have been serching forums/websites etc. for five hours and just ran BartPE.
It can't even see my c: drive. This is my second issue with a drive in the
past six months. Last time I somehow got chkdsk to run under DOS to fix this
issue. This time no luck. Also, I purchased and tried PowerSuite 2007 from
Spotmau to attempt fix. I would not recommend this product. Apologies for
verbosity, it should not be this hard for a relatively common issue.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

MSFT has to come up with a way to load a disk utility similar to chkdsk to
attempt to corrupt bad drive sectors, etc. On my machine I see the
following
message at boot, "windows\system32\config\system is missing or corrupted".
I
have been serching forums/websites etc. for five hours and just ran
BartPE.
It can't even see my c: drive. This is my second issue with a drive in
the
past six months. Last time I somehow got chkdsk to run under DOS to fix
this
issue. This time no luck. Also, I purchased and tried PowerSuite 2007
from
Spotmau to attempt fix. I would not recommend this product. Apologies
for
verbosity, it should not be this hard for a relatively common issue.

And your question was?

 

[DL]

Your hd manu. web site will likely have a downloadable utility, which will
create a bootable floppy / cd, with which you can test your hd.
If the utility shows there are problems, buy a new hd

Note; an iffy psu can also lead to hd 'corruption' issues

 

[Guest]

Very helpful response. Perhaps given your MVP status a better response might
have been:
a) acknowledge the issue - it is clear what the issue was
b) comfirm the difficulty of issue, or communicate otherwise
c) suggest a course of action

The need for a Boot Disk for windows XP with disk utilities is clear given
the multiple related threads here. If you have a clear path to this, please
let us all know.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the response. I did download a Seagate utility to build a boot CD
that would run a check on the drive. Strangely, it could not find the drive
(similar response from booting from Windows XP install disk). The fix
finally was just using the OEMs restore disk. It was able to execute and
backup data, but the backing up data was a real concern as the program listed
data loss as a significant risk.
Thanks again!

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have been in this game for far too long to second-guess the
question that the OP meant to ask but never quite got around
to. This applies to your post too: I would not have guessed
that you were asking about a bootable utilities disk. As it
happens, you're already aware of the Bart PE bood CD. In
my opinion this is an essential tool for administrators. Maybe
Microsoft have included something like this under Vista.