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Wireless NIC Problems...

C

chazdraves

Golden Member
Allrighty, so I was happily typing along here at Anandtech (on my computer upstairs that is) and I was reading up on CAS Latencies and stuff, trying to learn more about RAM. Anyhow, I learned some cool little things that I thought I'd try out, so I figured I'd restart and hit up the BIOS for a little test session. That's when it happened (dun, dun, dun) *scary music in background* As soon as I got done adjusting my memory settings (or rather, as soon as I got it to POST after adjusting my memory settings) I reached the happy little WinXP loading screen that generally means you're home free (yay!). Well, got past the load screen to the little Welcome screen thinkin' everything was all fine and dandy... problem is - it stopped there and Windows never loaded, but my mouse worked! Allrighty, no big deal, I'll just give 'er the old restart treatment, tweak some memory settings back down and we'll be good to go... Well, then I got this "The Following file is missing or contaminated: C:\Windows\System32\Config\SYSTEM". I thought "Huh, that's weird..." Then it says "You can attempt to repair this file by booting from the original System CD and pressing "r" at the first screen". Allrighty, I'll give that a try.. Well, I navigated my way through DOS into the aforementioned folder and there (of course) was that same SYSTEM file. So I did a chkdsk, it said it found some junk, I did a more thurough chkdsk, it took a long time. I figured I'd do a fixboot and a fixmbr as well just to make sure... same ole problem.

So here's where I sit... I can boot to the boot selection menu but I can't get into Safe Mode or Normal Mode cause this file's theoretically all messed up. I can't boot a DOS Prompt with CD Support because I don't have a floppy drive (though I may have a solution to that - Hello Win98 CD). I guess my question is this - I'm on my father's computer downstairs and he obviously also has a SYSTEM file on his computer... if I were to burn a CD with just this file on it, boot with the Win98 CD to a DOS Prompt with CD support, copy that file to replace my junky one, and then reboot; would that work? Am I gonna cause massive problems by using a SYSTEM file from a computer other than mine? Also, any clue what caused this to happen? Anyone see this before? Anyone heard of this before? Thanks a bunch in advance!

- Chaz

P.S. Did I mention how well it was running before? Bloody 'eck had to go and screw something up, just had to...
 
Heh. That file is part of the registry hive. Do *not* use a copy from another machine.

If you have Windows XP, you might try System Restore before anything. That will be the least destructive.

Otherwise, go back into the Recovery consele, and rename the SYSTEM file to SYSTEM.bak (it's unlikely you'll be able to recover what's in it, but not deleting it is good practice). Next, browse to the C:\windows\repair folder. You'll find a recovery version of all the registry files. Copy the SYSTEM file from this directory to C:\Windows\System32\Config\. Then reboot. I've never had just the SYSTEM hive damaged, so I'm not sure exactly what's going to happen as far as what you'll lose and what you won't.
 
Just as you posted I stumbled across this. And I guess that kinda answered my question. Anyone have any ideas on why/how this came about? Was this seriously a hardware issue or is this some random software kinda thing? Thanks again!

- Chaz
 
No sense starting a new post...

Problem #2: Now that I've got WinXP booting again, obviously it had to go through and refind all my hardware, which took a bit of reinstalling, but I came across another little problem.

After I got it all up and running (mostly) my wireless NIC no longer works. I checked the drivers, they installed just fine PnP like they're supposed to, it just simply doesn't do anything. The NIC on the back of the computer just flashes back and forth and Windows doesn't recognize that it should be doing something... I thought I'd try reinstalling the drivers from the CD but I get a Installshield 1607 Runtime error when I do that (which I'm still researching...). Anyhow, Windows recognized it and installed it, but it's not coming up under "Network Connections"... Any ideas? Also any ideas on the 1607? Thanks a bunch!

- Chaz
 
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