My buddy is a goose! Deleted i386 files! in XP Pro....

[Tommy Gunn]

Hi all,
As mentioned - my best mate is a goose and deleted the following files in this directory:
C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386
He was being over ambitious with a tidy up!!! dangerous thing with little knowledge.
It says the file NTLDR is missing etc etc.
He is 400 km's away from me and I can't do this over the phone!
His computer will not start up properly and he is not willing to re format and do a fresh install.
I have done this once and fixed it with 98SE or ME at some stage so I believe it may be fixable, correct me if I'm wrong.
Can this be fixed?
I tried pointing him in the direction of ASR by booting from CD but my knowledge when it gets to this kind of stuff is not that
good. He didn't make a rescue disk.
I believe using a rescue disc from another XP install will not work.....
Please help, if you can
Cheers,
TG

 

[Will Denny]

Hi TG

ASR will only work if a rescue disk has already been created. Try this:

Put the XP CD into the CD drive, reboot and access the Recovery Console - 'R' at the first screen. Copy 'NTLDR' form the XP CD in to the C:\ drive - or whatever the system drive letter is. The syntax is:

COPY X:\i386\ntldr C:\ntldr - where X is the CD drive letter and C is the system drive.

Reboot, after taking the XP CD out.

Will

 

[Alex Nichol]

As mentioned - my best mate is a goose and deleted the following files in this directory:
C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386
He was being over ambitious with a tidy up!!! dangerous thing with little knowledge.
It says the file NTLDR is missing etc etc.
He is 400 km's away from me and I can't do this over the phone!
His computer will not start up properly and he is not willing to re format and do a fresh install.

Provided he has a 'proper' XP CD (ie not some makers restore one that
does not have individual files), he can boot that (set BIOS to boot CD
first), Set the BIOS to boot CD before Hard Disk. instead of Setup,
take the immediate R for Repair. Assume any password requested is
blank, and TAB over. Assuming the CD drive letter is x: give
COPY x:\i386\ntldr C:\ntldr

and as he may well have deleted this as well
COPY x:\i386\ntdetect.com C:\ntdetect.com

If he also deleted boot.ini the extra command for that would be
BootCfg /Rebuild

But I would try first before using it, as if there is a copy already
around, thee system will be added to it as an added confusion.

The ServicePackFiles folder contains all the ones from SP1 that would be
needed if he adds hardware, or if system file protection calls for a
replacement. The system will work without, as long as nothing actually
causes it to go back to one of these files - doing so will start
generating version muddle. The *safe* course is to run a repair
reinstall - Set the BIOS to boot CD before Hard disk, then boot the XP
CD, start Setup (do not now take 'Repair' at this stage), then after the
license agreement take 'Repair Installation'. This will retain
existing software installations and most settings. But Updates will
have to be run again, especially SP1;

It is important to activate the basic XP Firewall before you ever
connect to the net to get the patches, so as to be protected against
things like the BLAST worm.