My oldest cruncher crashed, back up again in time for the MTR!!

[Wiz]

My p3 1.26 W/512K cache had the dreaded:

(black screen, white letters)
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windowsroot\system32\system>
Please reinstall this file...

So I go to put in the XP cd & the cd/dvd rom drive is all buggered up - won't work at all.
Fortunately in my computer junkyard I happen to have a couple old cd rom drives that are functional.
Swap & restart with the cd in & the bios switched to boot from cd first...
Started setup, got to the point where you can press R for recovery console, then had to think a bit about what I wanted to do. Figured that maybe it was just a glitch so I ran "chkdsk.exe c: /r"
It did a massive long run & then rebooted - XP started up great. Just for grins I set it to run "error checking" from disk properties & restarted. Now it's been happily crunching seti again since (& it's one of the kids web surfing stations - reducing contention for computers relieves family stresses)

Long story short - Recovery Console is your friend 😉

 

[petrusbroder]

Good! It is - as a matter of fact - the first time I hear about Recovery Console doing it's job. 😀
OTOH: I have not had many problems either, and my friends - well - they just run MS - ware ... which IMHO should be enough for at least one crash ... 😛

 

[Wiz]

I've had to use it before, once when I changed motherboards & something wasn't quite kosher... Another time (couple years ago) when a chkdsk also bailed me out, which is why I tried that first this time 😉

 

[Dalephi]

Good thing. We need every work unit we can get for the race.