Hi!

My home PC running WinXP SP2 crashed today and I haven't been able to recover. Initial error was it couldn't find the system file. I ran the Recovery Console and discovered the C drive wasn't accessible. Ran chkdsk and this seemed to help a little as the next boot up found the C drive. However, still got the same message regarding the system file. Found an article saying the system and other files may be corrupt. Per the article, I backed up the files under the config directory and restored from the repair directory. This seemed to get me further along, but sill getting the same error. Ran bootcfg /scan and it failed. Reran chkdsk /r, which ran for quite a while and then 'hung' at 75% with no further disk activity. After the chkdsk, reran bootcfg /scan successfully, but still same system error. Checked boot.ini file and it seems to be intact. DISKPART is also returning information. Rerunning chkdsk seems to go further each time, but ends up hanging up at some point before completing.

Really appreciate any help.

~Mateo

Looks like your harddisk crashed! Or, some nasty virus corrupted the registry. Or... fill in for yourself.

Sorry, but I am afraid you will have to lick your wounds, and join our club of frustrated Windows users who have to reinstall everything from scratch, from time to time.
Even IF you succeeded in making things 'work' again, you would always have some unreliable version of XP...

Of course, you didn't make any backups?

You might want to run chkdsk /r and leave it on for awhile because I have watched mine while it does it and for some reason it skips around numbers like it goes to about 70% then reverts back to 50% and stalls. Just let it go for an hour or so (or depending how big your hard drive is) and see what happens from there.

Nope, no backups. Chkdsk ran for over an hour and then would hang up. I think there were some bad sectors in the disk and chkdsk flagged them. Unfortunately, some windows system files were probably lost as well. I plan on installing the disk on another system to recover my files and then reinstalling XP. Thanks for the replies.

~Mateo

SPINRITE

Bloody excelent at making crap hard drives accessable again. Infact i was asked to look at a friends pc a little while ago and every time i turned it on it would bluescreen so i rad spinrit from a floppy (can be cd) and like magic on level 4 it was up and working again in about 3 and a half hours with no data loss atall.
You can buy it or get it from where the pirates moore their boats

Good luck

I was going to recommend SpinRite as well nathan, so good suggestion. However, I was just gonna say buy it.

I agree that this is a buy, Mr. Gibson deserves his money for this app!

Couldn`t agree more scott and taco bell.
My copy is bought and i think it`s one of the single best buys for me ever.
But some people live on *borrowed* ( some don`t like the term STOLEN ) software even though it`s only right that they should buy it to show their support for well written applications.

SpinRite looks pretty good, but since I heard about it, I never have had a situation where I actually needed it. However, I know someone else who has, and I told them about this program. They tried it and said that it worked for them.

I took the plunge and purchased Spinrite. However, i can't get my PC to boot from the SpinRite bootable CD. It boots fine using the Windows install CD. Any ideas?

~Mateo

I always use a bootable floppy and i never have any problems. So as for the cd i`m sorry but you`ll have to wait for someone else to help you...