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"C:\windows\system32\config\system was missing or corrupted"
Hi,
I was working away quite happily on my 2 year old second user Inspiron 5150 last night when I got the infamous blue screen (a KERNEL Stack error) and a message to restart. When I did this I got a Cardbus NIC failure followed by the "no bootable device press F1 to retry or F2 to enter Setup" message. All the bootable devices had turned blue in the setup screen. My hard disk was being detected as 60 GB which is correct.
I had a look in the knowledge base and found out about booting from my Windows XP CD and pressing R to use the Recovery console, which I did and ran CHKDSK /p which reported no errors. I then tried restarting and got the missing config message as shown in the topic title. I can do a DIR in DOS and see what's on my HD but when I try to change directory to C:/WINDOWS I get access denied.
I don't want to lose my data (I have the files for a website that I've been working on for 2 months on there) so should I reinstall Win XP to a new directory or just overwrite the old one and reapply SP1 and SP2 ? I know I will probably lose My Documents etc but I think I can live with this if the other directories and data is safe using this method.
Can anyone advise me what's the best way forward please ?
Forgot to mention that I also tried to access the C:/DELL directory from DOS in case there was a Utility I could use to recover my HD but I also got Access Denied on this. As I am the second user of this laptop I don't have the Dell Utilities or Drivers CDs. Is there somewhere I can download their contents using my Desktop so I can make a back up Utilities CD ?
Message Edited by Jannii on 11-24-2005 04:10 AM
I seem to have made this a sticky somehow can someone reset t to a normal post please. Sorry n00b at work.
Message Edited by Jannii on 11-24-2005 04:12 AM
Jannii
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November 24th, 2005 08:00
Sorry double posted :smileysurprised:
Message Edited by Jannii on 11-24-2005 04:11 AM
ejn63
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November 24th, 2005 09:00
Buy a notebook to desktop drive cable or an external USB 2.0/firewire 2.5" drive enclosure, attach the drive to a working desktop or notebook and copy your data for backup.
DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT A BACKUP - DOING SO COULD BE FATAL TO YOUR DATA.
Return the drive to the notebook. Boot, press F12 and run the extended diagnostics on the drive. If the drive passes, skip the next step.
If the drive fails and you're under warranty, call Dell, report the error and they'll ship you a new drive.
If the drive fails and you're out of warranty, bin it and replace it - any notebook 2.5" drive will work.
If the drive passes, you can continue to try a repair (which fails more often than it succeeds) or bite the bullet and reinstall everything from scratch.
Recovery usually fails to restore the registry; in about 70-80% of all cases, it's a hardware fault that causes the problem.
Jannii
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November 24th, 2005 12:00
I don't have a warranty as I didn't purchase the laptop new unfortunately. Many thanks for your advice.
Jannii
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November 27th, 2005 11:00
Message Edited by Jannii on 11-27-2005 07:19 AM
ejn63
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November 27th, 2005 15:00
Jannii
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November 27th, 2005 19:00
ejn63
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November 27th, 2005 20:00
If you're using a non-Dell XP CD, the Dell CD key won't work.
Jannii
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November 30th, 2005 17:00
AtlBraves
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February 5th, 2006 15:00