XP Home won't boot

[witness]

Error msg...NTFS.SYS missing or corrupt.

I have gone into recovery and replaced the file with the one from the cd. I have used FIXBOOT and FIXMBR. Still get the same exact error msg. Any other suggestions??

Thanks!!
DD

[EzyStvy]

"Missing or corrupt Ntfs.sys" error message when you restart Windows XP after you convert your hard disk to the NTFS file system

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;822800

[witness]

That just shows how to replace the ntfs.sys file. I did that yesterday, althought I went about it a little differently, and it still says the same thing.

From the cd I used copy i386/ntfs.sys c:\windows\system32\drivers\ and when it asked to overwrite I said yes. So it's a new file, should be in the right place, but it still says that it is missing or corrupt.

This computer is a couple of years old and we have not made any changes to it in a long time. My daughter was on some gaming site chat room when the computer froze and now won't boot. Yes, we have firewall and AV.

I am afraid that it is fatal, but am still hoping that it's not.

I am going to go ahead and put another drive in it and set it up and then access the old drive just to transfer data to the new one. But, it would still be nice to figure out exactly what happened...Hacker? Virus? Aneurysm?

[pam123]

I vote for the last.
The only way to know for sure would be to download a diagnostic for your hard drive and run it from a boot floppy to check for bad sectors on the drive.