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RJE49 wrote:

We have a Dimension 8100, running W2K, with a primary HD being a Maxtor 20gb, plus a secondary WD 160gb. One night recently, a storm knocked out the power. When restarting, it didn't re-boot, giving the error message: "Windows could not start because the folowing file is missing or corupt: \ Winnet\sytem32\config\systemced". After making sure the controller was "on", now it says "a disk read error ocurred". Googling the former brought me to Microsoft article 269075, which gives 2 possible causes - "The system hive in the registry is missing/damaged", or a "Promise Technology ATA66 PCI controller card is installed". Seeing as the hard drives plug into the MB, and not a PCI card, I went the route of repairing the OS.

First it said the the OS could not be repaired, so I went for a clean re-install. (I've sucessfully done this before). After waiting out formatting, it said the hard drive couldn't be formatted because it was damaged. I switched to the WD 160. Still booting from the CD-Rom, it goes through the "loading set-up files", partitioning, formatting, and "copying files to W2k installation folders". Then it re-boots and I'm back to loading files, etc again. It's simply going around in circles.

At this point I'm wondering if the HDs are ok (the WD is practically new) but the IDE controller is the culprit. I thought I'd "ask the experts" before buying a PCI card - or anything else.

 

Reboot, hit F12, and run diagnostics on both hard drives.

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RJE49 wrote:

F12 gets me "Error Loading OS".  Maybe because of re-formatting?

Use the resource CD.