Crusing through Al Gore’s greatest invention checking out some interesting stuff when… Laptop goes down. Now I know ya’ll are thinking “stop with the porn” but today I was clean. Hit some fun sites like comegetyousome and ebaums but nothing that I havent seen before…
When I restart I get this message:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt
\windows\system32\config\system
Any ideas?
I think you are in a world of hurt: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545
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Holy crap!
My head hurts just looking at that. Thanks for the link. I have a ton of work related pics and files on that laptop.
I think it might be less stressful for you to just buy a new computer. Ouch!
Seriously, if you’re not computer-savvy, I would get someone who knows computers to take a look. It’s going to be a painful process even if you know what you’re doing.
Can’t speak to getting everything up with existing hardware, but a couple of quick options are:
Good luck.
I think you are in a world of hurt: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545
Where have I seen that before?
Oh, yeah.
On this computer.
The one that runs only Linux now.
I had that problem several times on this computer. I was successful in restoring most functionality following the directions that Ken gave above a few times. I fixed it booting into Linux, and following most of those directions, then booting back into Windoze, and completeing the rest.
After time, the hard drive became full, and I put in a new, larger hard drive, and formatted the new drive with an NTFS partition for the C: drive. I shouldn’t have done that, because next time a file became corrupted, and this rescue applied, I tried to rescue the machine from Linux, and discovered much to my chagrin that NTFS is proprietary, and not yet supported by Linux. The partition mounts read only, so the fix couldn’t be implemented because I couldn’t write files on the NTFS partition from Linux. The rescue was too painful in Windows with all the reboots it requires…and reboots from the CD were taking about 25 minutes from the CDROM. Ultimately, I was unsuccessful in rescuing the Windows functionality of this machine.
I bought a new computer to replace the Windoesn’t functionality of this machine, and this machine only runs Linux now (as a file server on my network).
If you are afraid to try the fix that Ken shows above, a PC tech can fix this, and get most of the functionality back for you.
Good luck.
Best option, get a tech to help you.
Failing that, there are some repair kits on a CD. The one I use I downloaded from home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd - burn it to a CD and boot from it.
I would highly recommend option 1 however!
I think you may also be able to do a repair install with your Windows XP disc. Boot off of it and see if it gives you that option.
I did something similar when I realized by dual-core laptop was really fucking slow because it was only running on one core. Turns out that when I had a bad drive and exchanged it with Dell, the new drive they sent me was a single-core install. Only took me 6 months to figure that out. Fortunately, I work primarily with a blazing fast dual-core desktop (built by myself, if I must say) and so it was only a minor annoyance. But the wonderful world of the internet, in addition to supplying porn and stock tips, was able to locate the solution to this problem in only seconds.
The other method looks rather painful. Mine, if it works, is a little more straightforward, and may clean up some other issues as well.