need help

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Ok, so my mother's laptop had crashed and upon reboot it says: windows.system32.config.system file is either corrupt or missing. So, I did a test on the drive through the bios and it passed. I also hooked it up to my desktop and everything was intact - ran a Windows defender scan on it and it passed. Still same error. Tried to reinstall but XP says it cannot find disk. I've loaded up bios defaults 3 times. Just got done reformatting it and tried a fresh XP install and it says it cannot find any disk.

Any suggestions???

Thanx

 

[nerp]

how new is the laptop? Maybe you need to manually load the proper SATA driver during XP install? If the laptop drive is SATA, this is most likely the case. XP sucks with installations with newer SATA drives and controllers.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

ahh, thanks, i'll give it a try

 

[Denithor]

What version of XP do you have? Does it include SP2 or SP3? Those revisions included much better SATA support than the older original or SP1 packages. Might look into slipstreaming in SP3 if you haven't already.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

its SP1

I have never even heard of slipstreaming nor know how I would do it/that.

 

[Denithor]

Slipstream guide.

Just use SP3 instead of SP2 shown in these instructions. And keep in mind you only have to use SP3 alone, it includes all updates from SP1&2 already.