Windows woes

Last night I experienced something new. Upon turning on my PC, windows failed to start. I recieved an error message that windows/system32/config/system is corrupt. This occured after installing the latest FireFox update and reboot - hmmm....

Set BIOS to boot from CD and tried the PC's system restore CD. The machine kept hanging, and it never was able to repair. It would just hang - for a long time, then reboot. Sometimes I'd get an error message that some other system file was corrupt and that it didn't even try to repair it. So I swapped the drive out with a spare 10 GB HD and installed WinXP on that (one sentance for 45 minutes of screwing around there) Then I was able to plug in my bad(?) HD as a slave and was able to see and recover some of the files off of it.

Finally, with a working OS on the 10 GB HD, I was able to start screwing around with the bad(?) HDD. After several abortive attempts, still very limited luck. Here's a side question for you - I thought WinXP had built in CD writting - yet I had to install Nero to actually back anything up onto DVD. Is there an option I missed or is DVD writting not supported by native WinXP?

Anyway, I wasn't sure if my HDD was bad, my files were just randomly corrupted, I had a virus, or what. So I installed, updated, and ran AVG - for 35 minutes. It found nothing.

So I ran ScanDisk, went and had dinner, and when I came back, the computer had rebooted and looked good. No idea if it repaired anything or not - apparently it didn't stop at the report screen like I would have expected. I still wasn't back in my old WinXP though.

So I unplugged the 10 GB HDD and now was finally able to reinstall WinXP on the bad(?) HDD. But it never bothered checking/detecting my old version of WinXP - it just installed a brand new version of WinXP next to the old one. So when I restart it gives me a list of 3 WinXP's to select from (I had to try this several times - so apparently I actually installed two new WinXPs). If I select the bottom one, I still get an error message and it fails to launch. If I select the top one, I launch WinXP and the PC works - however it's a blank OS. I can no longer access any of my old documents that were in My Documents. I assume this is because I'm not logged into windows as that user (User1), which was a passworded account - so It's not letting me into User1's Documents and settings.

None of my old applications seem to work anymore either - probably because they're looking for the old WindowsXP register to run. I'd like to just do a wipe and reinstall, but it sure would be nice to recover my documents from my User1 account as well as recover my Outlook e-mails and addy book. Any tips on how I can do that?

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Originally Posted by [AK]Clay

Here's a side question for you - I thought WinXP had built in CD writting - yet I had to install Nero to actually back anything up onto DVD. Is there an option I missed or is DVD writting not supported by native WinXP?

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It only works for CD as far as I know. I almost always use Nero as I've had a few misc issues with the default Windows writing.

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Any tips on how I can do that?

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Ouch, it sounds like to me you had some bad sectors on your old hard drive that had the system files on it. Did you ever attempt to boot into safe mode and do a restore?

As far as getting your other files, you should be able to access them even if the account was password protected, unless you used encryption - then you might have a problem.

Sorry I don't have any other useful advice. I have a pretty robust backup routine so whenever I have a Windows problem... I just blow it all away and reinstall from scratch which still sucks, but it's better than messing around to fix a hosed install.

Thanks Scot - good suggestion on the safe mode. Unfortunately I still get the error message that system file is corrupt when doing so - along with the message that if I insert the WinXP CD and select R for repair it will do so (which didn't work).

Also, when I go to C:\Documents and Settings\User1, it tells me User1 is not accessable and that access is denied.

hit F8 when you start windows, select "Last Known Good"

if it doesn't work from there, try this:

boot into safe mode, command prompt option.
issue these commands:

"cd C:\Windows\System32\Config"
"copy system system.old"
"copy system.sav system"

This shows a corruption in the registry.
If you still are having issues, I'll talk to you tonight online to get this figured out.

Thanks Chooz - some interesting new options. I was able to rename files as you say - though ended up having to do so by first booting into the new install of WinXP.

Upon reboot and selecting the option to boot into safe mode, then selecting the old (bad) version of XP to boot into - it gave me a new error message:
"Windows XP cannot run under Safemode. Setup will restart now"

So restart into regular mode and selecting the old (bad) WinXP.
"Fatal Error - an error has been encountered that prevents setup from continuing. Internal setup data structures are corrupted (phase 0)"