need help with system 32

Try this.

 

http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=5097

I think I may be able to help you! (If not, sorry - hopefully my experience and steps mentioned below help other users. I also hope you are computer literate as some of my steps require a little experience with computers - however, this is not too advanced either. If not comfortable with the steps outlined below, ask the neighbor's kid for help and offer to help him with his Scout camp/cookies expenses! :) )

I had this same message show up day before yesterday. There was a power failure in the afternoon and then the computer when it starts gives the following message (I paraphrase from memory)

c:\windows\system32\config\system is corrupt. Press r to restart.

Of course, pressing r would restart the computer and it would stop at the same thing. Everything I did would lead to the same problem.

Fixing this was slightly more laborious for me since I did not have the Dell System Restore CD (didn't pay the bucks to get the CD with the system that I was buying). This is much easier if you have the Restore CD (I think) which may let you load Windows Recovery Console. I am unsure if the Dell CD allows or does not allow this - However if you have the original Win XP CD, then it definitely allows you to start the Windows Recovery Console.

First steps
1. During the system boot, I pressed F8 (right on the initial screen which says Dell at the time that the top part says press F2 to get to the BIOS and F12 to select startup options).

2. F8 will lead to a menu. I chose Tried using Last Known hardware configuration. This did not work for me. (If it works for you, then you're home free! No need to do the rest of the steps)

3. Went back into F8 menu and tried to get into Safe mode (any of the 3 choices for Safe Mode). Still no luck for me. This was beginning to look bad.

4. Read on the internet. Searched on microsoft's website (search term was '/system corrupt'). The best resource I found was article ID 307545 on Microsoft's support site. It let me know that the problem was that 5 files in c:\windows\system32\config directory taken together work as the registry. My registry had been corrupted evidently. That article specifically guides you thru fixing your problems using the Windows Recovery Console and Windows System Restore. My problem was that I didn't have the CD so I couldn't use Windows Recovery Console. If you have the Windows XP CD, then your best bet is to follow the directions in the article. If you don't have a way to start the Windows Recovery Console, then follow along as follows. The idea is to delete the current (corrupted) files and find an older version and put it into the c:\windows\system32\config folder and your computer should work....

5. I used a DOS bootdisk (there are disk images available at bootdisk.com or you might have a Win98 bootdisk lying around. However after booting to a:\, I could not change directory to c:\ - It took me a little while to figure out that this was because by C:\ directory was based on NTFS and could not be accessed from DOS (without getting some special tools which I didn't search for). I also had to scrounge up a USB diskette drive to test my DOS scheme since my dimension desktop did not have a diskette drive. So the DOS bootdisk really didn't help any. You can skip this step if you already know that the C:\ drive in your XP computer uses NTFS and not FAT/FAT32.

6. On another pc (work laptop) I went to Knoppix.net and downloaded an iso image (a file ending with .iso) of a Linux OS distribution (called Knoppix). I used the version 5.1 distribution. I used a burning software to burn a CD-R with this distribution. FYI, Knoppix is a special distribution specially written such that it can boot completely just from a CD-R without modifying the harddisk itself and is often used to help fix problems when you can't boot into the Windows PC. I,
however, am a complete Knoppix novice. I just know the following steps about it. A more knowledgeable person will hopefully correct any missteps I suggest. Anyways - From Knoppix.net, find a download mirror which has Knoppix distribution code - this file should be around 600MB or thereabouts. So download takes a little time. After downloading, I burned the image to the CD-R. (I am not burning the .iso file to the CD-R as a data file. The .iso file is an image of a CD. You use a CD-burning software which interprets the .iso and correctly burns the contents to the CD).

7. Loaded up the Knoppix CD (5.1 distribution in my case) to the primary CD-Rom drive. Again rebooted, and pressed F12. Chose to boot using the Onboard or usb CD-rom option. This should load Knoppix. It takes about a minute or two and towards the end you'll even hear a Female saying "Initializing Knoppix". Wait for everything to finish. You should be left with a desktop and a Konqueror (a Linux browser/file explorer) window showing a Knoppix page. You can click EN on this page to view English documentation (from which I scrounged up the next few steps somehow). However it's documentation wasn't excellent or maybe I didn't have too much patience for it.

8. On the desktop, you will have icons for hard disk (they are called weird names like hda1 or sda1 or something). Click on them and the contents are shown in a file explorer like window. The object is to find the c:\ drive - or rather the specifc icon that shows the contents of what is your c:\ drive. Once you know which icon it is, close all file explorer windows.

9. Right click on the hard drive icon which corresponds to the c:\ drive (I am assuming that c:\ is  the drive that has windows installed on it, which is almost always the default). Select Properties. Go to Device tab and uncheck the box that says Read Only. (Knoppix, which is very cool, in order to prevent damage to your computer automatically puts all the hard disks on your computer as read-only. It exists purely in your computer's memory and does not write a single file to your disk (unless you specifically want it to - for which you have to do all this stuff). So now, hopefully, you should be able to write to your c:\ drive.

10. I couldn't find any other place where there were the 5 files (I mention the names of the 5 files in a step below) that together form the registry so I chose to use the versions found in c:\windows\repair (One quick note - I couldn't find one of the five files in c:\windows\repair. I did find a .bak version of that file (ie. the name of the file ending with .bak) so I copied the .bak into c:\windows\system32\config
directory and then renamed the file and deleted the extension of .bak). I was easily able to carry out those file operations using the default file explorers in Knoppix.

11. Then I shutdown Knoppix (it has a K button just like the Windows Start button and then logout). Watching it shutdown is fun (if you've never seen Linux shutting down). You see all kinds of stuff about 'sent kill signal to processes' etc. And the female voice you heard earlier comes up again saying "Initiating Shutdown". I wonder whether she does more stuff in Knoppix. The voice reminds me of the generic deadpan female voices used as The-Voice-Of-The-Computer on the 60-70s era sci-fi TV serials. Anyway, you take out the CD and reboot.

12. This solved the problem of the error message about 'c:\windows\system32\config\system is corrupt' and I was able to boot and Windows loaded. All my users that had been setup were gone! I had to login as "Owner" (no password) and no internet connection. I made a mistake - I tried around at this point trying to figure out the internet connection and trying to delete stuff from the Device Manager entries hoping that the proper network drivers would load but was not finding it easy going. My mistake (I soon realized) was that I hadn't finished doing all the things mentioned in the Microsoft article. What I had done was gone back to a really primitive version of the registry. From this point, System Restore doesn't work either since your newly-repaired registry (which is so old that it) does not know of the other system restore points that do exist on your hard drive.

13. So, I followed the steps in the MS article. It talked me thru finding the System Volume information. Loading up in Safe mode and saving the 5 files into a special tmp directory in c:\windows from one of the recent snapshots made by System Restore. Note that I could not directly overwrite the 5 registry files (SAM, SOFTWARE, SYSTEM, DEFAULT, SECURITY) as they were in use by Windows.

14. I again had to go back into Knoppix and then overwrite the registry files (the 5 files named SAM, SOFTWARE, SYSTEM, DEFAULT and SECURITY in c:\windows\system32\config) only after making the c:\ drive not read-only (see step 9). Once again, shutdown Knoppix, take the CD out and reboot into Windows.

15. Finally from Windows (and now I could see the usual set of users that normally exist on my computer), I logged into the administrator account and ran System Restore and restored from a different point than the date from the System Volume Information's version of the 5 registry files.

That seemed to do the trick.

Sorry for the long post - The Knoppix step takes a little time but is the only way that I know of where I could do the tasks without having access to the Windows Recovery Console since I didn't have the Windows XP CD.

I have a XP home disk...would it work even if it has XP media on it? I sure dont want to install home..I like media better.

Well,I didnt have a way to download Knoppix..So I have a Windows XP Home, tried to do clean boot,and it says something failure to find diskette drive..(if I remember right)..Its like the hard drive is wiped out..

It will load up until it reboots..then get error message..

When it gets almost to the end of the first Dell screen, it goes to a black screen and says Floppy diskette seek failure,Drive 1 not found: Serial ATA, SATA-2

Strike the F1 key to continue,F2 to run the setup utility..

Last time I did it, it went to a blue screen.So I rebooted,hit F1,and this time it loaded!!!!

I am looking at XP screen right now!! TThank you all very much for responding and helping me fix it!!

Now that I have it up and running on Home,I have found out that what I did,has wiped out alot of drivers..

Also, it will not let me activate my windows..

Or install my anti virus software..

It still has most of the things from the original Windows and things that I have put on here. The things like the games I have put on here are still here,just erased the registration key from them,started on trial versions..

 

I think what has happened is that it has wiped your previous settings. You should still try to get a slightly earlier version of the registry installed. Maybe find one that was automatically stored in System Restore a few days prior to your failure in the snapshot directory and then copy to your c:\windows\sytem32\config directory directory.

This is the link from Microsoft that I was talking about - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545/
I would start from Part Two onwards from the Microsoft article. Remember that this will be much easier (the Knoppix step is not needed then) if you have Windows Recovery Console available to you. Instead of doing the steps, try first reading the entire article - what you are trying to do is get to a version of the registry that will show your restore points (something that you have done or has automatically happened (hey, it happens!) has probably reverted your registry to a very early level and therefore you are not able to see recent system restore events.) and then use system restore to restore to a particular point (before your computer crashed) so that your computer is running at a level slightly earlier than when the crash took place. Once you have the concept of what you're trying to accomplish down, then you will be able to figure out what the best steps are for you.

Hope this helps you.