Sometimes Windows XP can act really stupid. I waked up in the morning and started my computer. I worked fine last night and was just looking for checking my mails and all of a sudden I got this message
WINDOWS COULD NOT START BECAUSE THE FOLLOWING FILE IS MISSING OR CORRUPT = windows\system32\config\system |
I thought it was just a little prank XP does all the time and restarted my computer and now bang it just caught into a reboot loop. The windows boot splash shows up for a few seconds and then it restarts the system all over again and again, I was real frustrated and was determined to fix the problems as I had important office documents and other stuff I definitely not wanted to loose.
Upon doing a little research I got a working solution which fixed it up. I’m writing this up as I saw a lot of people searching for straight solution to this problem and very few of the search results I got were useful and helping.
So we can fix it using Windows repair. You may need the WindowsXP installation CD and some idea of DOS copy (http://www.easydos.com/copy.html), delete (http://www.easydos.com/del.html) and rename (http://www.easydos.com/rename.html) commands.
Boot the system to DOS mode or open the recovery console (using the WindowsXP installation CD if available) and make backups of the following files
c:\windows\system32\config\system (to c:\windows\tmp\system.bak)
c:\windows\system32\config\software (to c:\windows\tmp\software.bak)
c:\windows\system32\config\sam (to c:\windows\tmp\sam.bak)
c:\windows\system32\config\security (to c:\windows\tmp\security.bak)
c:\windows\system32\config\default (to c:\windows\tmp\default.bak)
then delete the above files (not the backups!)
then copy the above files from c:\windows\repair to c:\windows\system32\config directory
Assuming that you windows installation is @ c:\windows
Restart your computer, if everything goes right it should fix the problem and start your computer.
However this also have some side-effects as you’ll loose all the driver/software installations and the system will restore to it’s initial install time state so you may have to reinstall all those but all your files would be safe as you didn’t format and reinstall the system.
Hope this would help recovering your system..
