Hey, All,
An acquaintance of mine's computer took a dive today. I went over & took a look at it a few minutes ago, and I'm stumped (so I brought it home and have it here now). I'm not obligated to help this guy, but he's a friend of a friend so I said I would see what I can do.
Quick specs:
PC clone (3 years old)
P4 1.7GHz w/stock fan
Asus mobo
512 MB of Kingston Value RAM
Topower 300W PSU
1-year-old Seagate HD (that I installed & set up for him last year)
Unremarkable ATI vid card & Creative Labs sound card
Plextor CD-RW and Sony FDD (both installed by me last year)
Windows XP Pro SP 2 (and all current updates)
He runs Norton Inet Security, Spy Sweeper and Ad-Aware, and is pretty good (he says) about keeping all up to date.
Here's the sitch:
Upon power up, the Asus splash screen comes up. Then, before the Windows splash screen ever comes up, a white text message appears at the top of the screen saying something to the effect that Windows couldn't start up because "the following file is either missing or corrupt: System32/Drivers/pci.sys." The machine locks up there and all I can do is turn it off via the Power button (or unplug it).
Now, each time I power off & on, a different driver within the System 32 folder is showing as either missing or corrupt. So it's not just a pci driver gone missing. It suggests booting from the Windows CD to try to repair the missing file(s), so I tried that. No go. Windows starts loading files from the CD (LOTS of drivers), but then I get:
"The file ntfs is corrupted. Press any key to continue."
When I do that, I get:
"Setup failed. Press any key to restart your computer."
When I do that I get:
"File ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded. The error code is 14. Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit."
Dang -- a kernel prob. That can't be good.
When I press a key to exit, the machine goes back to the Asus splash screen and the whole process starts over. However, sometimes it does make it to the Windows splash screen, but then the monitor goes black for a few seconds, then the Asus splash screen comes back on and everything just loops like that over & over.
I asked the obligatory questions about anything unusual going on before this happened, did he install anything new lately, was he purging files or folders recently, any power failures, any suspicious e-mails, etc. He said no to all that. (Could he have accidentally deleted the entire System32 folder?)
Any ideas here? Obviously Windows appears to be BADLY corrupted, but I'd really like to avoid having to reformat (& lose all his files) if I can avoid it. Any chance the only-1-year-old Seagate HD has died? If I could get into Safe Mode, I'd run some malware scans. But I can't even get that far.
I'm no computer tech, so I'm kinda winging it here. Any help would be much appreciated.
An acquaintance of mine's computer took a dive today. I went over & took a look at it a few minutes ago, and I'm stumped (so I brought it home and have it here now). I'm not obligated to help this guy, but he's a friend of a friend so I said I would see what I can do.
Quick specs:
PC clone (3 years old)
P4 1.7GHz w/stock fan
Asus mobo
512 MB of Kingston Value RAM
Topower 300W PSU
1-year-old Seagate HD (that I installed & set up for him last year)
Unremarkable ATI vid card & Creative Labs sound card
Plextor CD-RW and Sony FDD (both installed by me last year)
Windows XP Pro SP 2 (and all current updates)
He runs Norton Inet Security, Spy Sweeper and Ad-Aware, and is pretty good (he says) about keeping all up to date.
Here's the sitch:
Upon power up, the Asus splash screen comes up. Then, before the Windows splash screen ever comes up, a white text message appears at the top of the screen saying something to the effect that Windows couldn't start up because "the following file is either missing or corrupt: System32/Drivers/pci.sys." The machine locks up there and all I can do is turn it off via the Power button (or unplug it).
Now, each time I power off & on, a different driver within the System 32 folder is showing as either missing or corrupt. So it's not just a pci driver gone missing. It suggests booting from the Windows CD to try to repair the missing file(s), so I tried that. No go. Windows starts loading files from the CD (LOTS of drivers), but then I get:
"The file ntfs is corrupted. Press any key to continue."
When I do that, I get:
"Setup failed. Press any key to restart your computer."
When I do that I get:
"File ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded. The error code is 14. Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit."
Dang -- a kernel prob. That can't be good.
When I press a key to exit, the machine goes back to the Asus splash screen and the whole process starts over. However, sometimes it does make it to the Windows splash screen, but then the monitor goes black for a few seconds, then the Asus splash screen comes back on and everything just loops like that over & over.
I asked the obligatory questions about anything unusual going on before this happened, did he install anything new lately, was he purging files or folders recently, any power failures, any suspicious e-mails, etc. He said no to all that. (Could he have accidentally deleted the entire System32 folder?)
Any ideas here? Obviously Windows appears to be BADLY corrupted, but I'd really like to avoid having to reformat (& lose all his files) if I can avoid it. Any chance the only-1-year-old Seagate HD has died? If I could get into Safe Mode, I'd run some malware scans. But I can't even get that far.
I'm no computer tech, so I'm kinda winging it here. Any help would be much appreciated.
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