3 yr old XPS no longer recognizes hard drive

Question

When I try to boot my computer, it says 'Windows can't boot because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM You can attempt to repair the file by starting Windows Setup using the original setup CD ROM. Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair.' I tried doing that but got an error message stating that it could not repair anything because setup did not find any hard drives. It has a 240GB RAID setup. Any more specific hardware questions I will have to look up. Any thoughts?

xcator · Answer

http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org/how_do_i_repair_a_missing_or_cor1.htm   or just start fresh...

JEFort · Answer

Yeah - the only problem is that when I put in the recovery disk, it tells me that it can't find any hard drives.

XPS Gamer · Answer

Are you using the Dell Operating System disk or a regular Windows CD?  Windows requires the F6 Boot Disk in order to detect the hard drives.  Are the hard drives appearing in the RAID BIOS screen?  Do you have the original XPS or Gen 3?

JEFort · Answer

It's the Dell disk. The hard drives seem to be there in the BIOS. I'm not really sure what XPS it is - it's almost exactly 3 years old.

JEFort · Answer

nevermind - i lied. the disks are not detected in the bios.

Storage, Drives & Media

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