suggestions for a small OS that will see FAT32 & NTFS

[fortythree]

okay, here is my dilemna... i have gotten this error a couple times (both times i had to reinstall XP)..
when i go to boot up i get a "file (named SYSTEM) damaged or missing...
a little research and i found out that something must be writing a lot of data to the system registry hive thus making it take up too much memory which in turn results in not being able to boot...

anyways, i think i have figured out how to fix it without a reinstall... BUT...

is there a small OS that will fit on a floppy?... or even if i could burn the install onto a cd so i can boot into it from the cd if need be?

it would have to be able to see all my hard drives (NTFS & FAT32)?

also, is it just me or is the system restore just about pointless? (like, it's good if you install some driver that messes up your system... just restore back to last restore point) but unless you can still boot into windows, you cant access system restore (from what i have seen anyways)...

thanks in advance

 

[neuralfx]

there are a number of distro's that fit that description, try trinux .. http://freshmeat.net/projects/trinux/

good luck ..


-neural

 

[MikeMusic]

This sounds a lot like a problem I've heard about, possibly fixable with a hot fix executable that's presumably going to be part of some Microsoft service pack... or so I have been told. A guy I know sent me the file, but I never ran it because the crashes I was having suddenly stopped. I don't believe that my crashes were related to this particular problem. He told me that it stopped his practically incessant boot crashes. It was driving him up the wall in his Win2k SP2 system until he ran the patch and never had the problem afterwards. If I were home I could tell you more, but I'm not. It's there that I have the file.