PC Problems

[Zirak]

Late last week we had some severe weather roll through and it fried the video card in the PC of one of my daughters. So I ordered a new card which arrived yesterday. After all kinds of issues with installation that I won't get into that ended with the new card in her sister's computer and her sister's card in her computer I finally had her computer in a state where it would boot up with graphics. However, at some point in the fiddling with graphics cards her OS got corrupted. Now when I boot her computer I get some message about a missing or corrupt file in windows/system32/config/system.

At the advice of Snow on Vent last night I tried booting to a Win XP disk and starting the process of an install hoping that Windows would see the existing installation and do a repair. It did not. If I go out to a recovery console I am unable to do a DIR of the hard drive as it seems the NTFS file table is corrupt. I tried running a chkdsk from the recovery console this morning. It churned for several hours but to no avail. The computer gets the same message at boot.

Now my wife and I homeschool our kids and all of my daughter's schoolwork except for her math is on her computer so re-formatting and re-installing as Windows wants to do at this point is not an option.

The only idea I have at this point is to mount her HD as a secondary drive in another computer and hope I can pull all of the data off.

The whole point of this post is to see if anyone knows of any other recovery options I could try to get her OS up and running again.

[Diggles]

They make external SATA/IDE > USB kits. About the best $20 I've spent on tools ever

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So you can take the HD out of computer in question, hook it up with this and plug it into working computer like a flash drive. Copy off what you need, then you can reformat.


Sounds like you need to invest in some UPS units for your computers

[Fretty]

I like Diggles solution for your current problem.
For the future, on top of decent UPS for your devices at home, I would also recommend a backup solution as well.
Whether it be backing up important files to an external hard drive or something else, it never hurts to have a backup.

[Zirak]

I have UPS on 2 of the 4 computers in the house and this computer had surge protection that, sadly, did it no good. You know, I think I may have one of those kits kicking around somewhere that I bought a few years back for something else. I'll have to dig around.

[Droa]

There are a few things you can try.
-http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ download the iso, create and boot from this disk there are a ton of free options for HD diagnosis (get a hold of me and I can walk you through the best ones -- <!-- e --><a href="mailto:mike@bitzcomputers.com">mike@bitzcomputers.com</a><!-- e -->) There are a few tools on this that can recover partition tables and MBR's.
-on that same disk there is a bootable linux version called Parted magic, it can tell you if the HD has an issue and we have better luck with linux reading some drive errors than windows. (you can transfer right from linux to an external HD)
-Knoppix is another linux distro that specializes in reading windows partitions.

-The error you are getting is usually caused by a corrupt registry hive (can be recovered with some work) but the partition tables have to be fixed.

These are a few options to try before pulling the HD out.

Droa

[Valthar^_^]

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long and short of it
copy your old registry files to a temp folder
delete your old registry files in your windows\system32\config folder
copy new versions of those files into that same directory
boot into safe mode and do some other stuff.

[Zirak]

I backed up my daughter's HD and while that long process was going on I dug around the computer room a bit more and found another Win XP disk - I had been using a Dell disk that came with my wife's computer, this one was a store bought disk. Once the back-up was done I put her computer back together, popped in this other OS disk and booted to CD. This disk, unlike the one from Dell, recognized her Windows install and offered to repair it. I had quite a bit of patching to do once it was done but the important bit is that she is back up and running. There are a few bits of hardware that the computer is failing to install drivers for but I'm not sure which components are causing the issue right now but that can wait to be fixed once I am no longer so burned out on working on her computer - at least she is running.

Thanks for the suggestions.