I need some serious help fixing a friends system that I messed up. I am a pretty savvy geek who just reformats when I have a problem like this, but I need help because I want to make everything like it was and could use some help on rebuilding his setup.
The story is my friend brought up his new cheap system to play on my lan. We noticed his sempron rig was a lot slower than my barton 2500+ rig. Today I had to print something and since his comp (he left here) was wired instead of the system normally hooked to the printer, I just plugged the usb cable into his rig and printed.
Then I started checking things out. His system properties reported his cpu speed was 1.33ghz. I verified they don't make semprons that slow and went into his bios and set his fsb from 133 to 166, making it run stock speeds. I was pleased that I could help a friend get what he paid for out of his machine.
But my friend wasn't there and I was wondering if I could do a tiny little bit of overclocking on his epox motherboard. In other words I kept screwing around tweaking things. I have done a good amount of overclocking and was hoping to get his cpu to 200mhz fsb, which should be easy if all other speeds stayed the same. I looked at the manual and BIOS lets you set cpu fsb and voltage, and lock ram at 200mhz. I started testing things in 10mhz increments, to push the cpu 100mhz faster every time. Since this was the only thing I believe I was overclocking slightly, I felt it was safe.
I kept tweaking settings, and pushed the fsb to 187 just fine. I wanted to get back into BIOS again but windows was loading too quickly and I wasn't hitting delete in time. Out of impatience on the second re-try, I hit the hard reset so I could get into BIOS. I think this was my mistake I did, and set cpu fsb to 197. When it rebooted, it gave me some error message about recovering from a partial load of windows, and one app, Steam I think complained about a dll not matching. I rebooted to change another setting and couldn't get into windows. I got 2 lines on the load screen saying "Boot from CD:" that hung there.
I was able to reload on the third try after pounding F8 to try and load windows normally. I got an error message of a system file, I think it was "error loading C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM(32?)\system.inf file is missing or corrupted." Then it suggested for me to repair from the boot disk. I tried again to load safe mode and got same message. I thought great, I just pooched his windows. I've seen this message before when building a system and couldn't figure out how to use the command line repair mode on the boot disk to fix it, so I had to reinstall.
Now it doesn't even get that far, it just starts loading and says "NTLDR missing" which tells me windows is comatose. The only thing I've been doing is trying to reload.
I know how to reinstall windows by deleteing his existing WINDOWS directory, but this is a pain. My friend despite being an engineer is rather computer handicapped. He has a lot of programs installed and data i'd like to save. I should be able to salvage his desktop and documents, but i'd like to not have to tell him to reinstall all his apps that use the registry when he goes home, things like norton system works (ick, i know) and other junk he has. I'm thinking I need to get in and backup the registry and maybe that will keep program files functional if I load it into a fresh install. I'm just wondering how I can hack it. Or, if there is a program or technique I can use to repair this mistake I made without reinstalling windows.
CLIFFS:
Screwed up my friend's windows install with a hard reset while overclocking it
Want to make things right and keep his settings and programs all still work
need help making things all better, either by fixing it with a utility or a reinstall
I am windows repair mode incompetent
I am a moron for trying to overlock somone else's system.
The story is my friend brought up his new cheap system to play on my lan. We noticed his sempron rig was a lot slower than my barton 2500+ rig. Today I had to print something and since his comp (he left here) was wired instead of the system normally hooked to the printer, I just plugged the usb cable into his rig and printed.
Then I started checking things out. His system properties reported his cpu speed was 1.33ghz. I verified they don't make semprons that slow and went into his bios and set his fsb from 133 to 166, making it run stock speeds. I was pleased that I could help a friend get what he paid for out of his machine.
But my friend wasn't there and I was wondering if I could do a tiny little bit of overclocking on his epox motherboard. In other words I kept screwing around tweaking things. I have done a good amount of overclocking and was hoping to get his cpu to 200mhz fsb, which should be easy if all other speeds stayed the same. I looked at the manual and BIOS lets you set cpu fsb and voltage, and lock ram at 200mhz. I started testing things in 10mhz increments, to push the cpu 100mhz faster every time. Since this was the only thing I believe I was overclocking slightly, I felt it was safe.
I kept tweaking settings, and pushed the fsb to 187 just fine. I wanted to get back into BIOS again but windows was loading too quickly and I wasn't hitting delete in time. Out of impatience on the second re-try, I hit the hard reset so I could get into BIOS. I think this was my mistake I did, and set cpu fsb to 197. When it rebooted, it gave me some error message about recovering from a partial load of windows, and one app, Steam I think complained about a dll not matching. I rebooted to change another setting and couldn't get into windows. I got 2 lines on the load screen saying "Boot from CD:" that hung there.
I was able to reload on the third try after pounding F8 to try and load windows normally. I got an error message of a system file, I think it was "error loading C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM(32?)\system.inf file is missing or corrupted." Then it suggested for me to repair from the boot disk. I tried again to load safe mode and got same message. I thought great, I just pooched his windows. I've seen this message before when building a system and couldn't figure out how to use the command line repair mode on the boot disk to fix it, so I had to reinstall.
Now it doesn't even get that far, it just starts loading and says "NTLDR missing" which tells me windows is comatose. The only thing I've been doing is trying to reload.
I know how to reinstall windows by deleteing his existing WINDOWS directory, but this is a pain. My friend despite being an engineer is rather computer handicapped. He has a lot of programs installed and data i'd like to save. I should be able to salvage his desktop and documents, but i'd like to not have to tell him to reinstall all his apps that use the registry when he goes home, things like norton system works (ick, i know) and other junk he has. I'm thinking I need to get in and backup the registry and maybe that will keep program files functional if I load it into a fresh install. I'm just wondering how I can hack it. Or, if there is a program or technique I can use to repair this mistake I made without reinstalling windows.
CLIFFS:
Screwed up my friend's windows install with a hard reset while overclocking it
Want to make things right and keep his settings and programs all still work
need help making things all better, either by fixing it with a utility or a reinstall
I am windows repair mode incompetent
I am a moron for trying to overlock somone else's system.
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