System Crash

[TimJC]

Last night I had a system failure while running my PC in an overclocked configuration. Aftering reseting the BIOS settings I was unable to boot into windows. I keep getting a message saying that "C:\windows\system32\config\system is missing or currpt. Please insert the installation CD and hit 'r' when prompted to repair this problem."

When I get to the useless repair menu I am able to find the file that is corrupt, but I am unable to do anything about it.

I don't have any backups and I have 100gigs of data on my striped sata raid setup that I cannot afford to lose. Is there anything simple I can do to remedy this?

I was thinking that maybe I could buy a new hard drive and install XP on that in order to copy my files over before re-installing XP back onto my SATA drives. Is this a viable option?

Also, If I wanted to configure this extra drive for a Linux system (to play around with), should I make my XP disk to fat32 vs NTFS? Is there anything that I might have on the XP drive that I would need access to?

Thanks,
Tim

[DragonNOA1]

Originally Posted by TimJC I was thinking that maybe I could buy a new hard drive and install XP on that in order to copy my files over before re-installing XP back onto my SATA drives. Is this a viable option?

That would work. Or just run Linux from a CD and copy them over the network somewhere or to another HD.

Also, If I wanted to configure this extra drive for a Linux system (to play around with), should I make my XP disk to fat32 vs NTFS? Is there anything that I might have on the XP drive that I would need access to?

XP should be NTFS for security. And linux should be installed on its own partition. The versions of Linux that I have run have been able to read NTFS just fine.

[pam123]

The recovery console can be a pain if you don't know what to type into it.
Google turned up instructions for your error : http://www.aade.com/XPhint/XPrecovery.htm
You also have the option of a repair install.

[TimJC]

Ok I'm past step one after typing all the copy and delete commands on dos. now i'm back into windows.

[TimJC]

If software was not the cause of the crash (overclocking instability was the cause) do I still need to do step four? Basically my question is, is the restore point only to backup to before a bad or conflictive installation of the software that caused the crash? I only ask this because my latest checkpoint is january 1st.

Here's what step four is:

Part Four Do not skip this part as there is more to system restore than just the registry files. Click Start, and then click All Programs. Click Accessories, and then click System Tools. Click System Restore, and then click Restore to a previous Restore Point. select a restore point previous to the one that clobbered your system Usually any point prior to the installation of the thing that clobbered you. One dated the previous day usually works. You will not lose any data from documents you created or from your email accounts.

[pam123]

The problem is that the overclocking crash scrambled your software, so yes .
What have you done?
System Restore usually creates it's restore points automatically, and it does it more often then once a month.

[glc]

Let's see. You set up a RAID 0, which means that if one drive has a problem, the whole array crashes. You overclocked the computer. You have no data backups.

Strike 3.

Data recovery on those drives will cost thousands of dollars if they have to go to a lab.

[DragonNOA1]

Your data is the most expensive part of any computer... back it up!