Help for corrupt system files?

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Hello all,
Hoping for help or sympathy. Toshiba Satellite w/1Gb ram on XP Home, all updates installed and working AV. Bought used with no Toshiba recovery disks. Last night after working on simple things in Office 2003, closed lid on laptop as I usually do and this morning found it off (not usual but perhaps ran out of battery) at boot got message “can’t boot because file ntoskrnl.exe is missing or corrupt” Tried to access repair console with an XP Pro disc but got nowhere. Last Known Good Config and Safe Mode attempts- gave same message. Tried restoring ntoskrnl.exe from my Acronis backup (Acronis said successfully), message then changed to ” system32config is missing or corrupt” Again Acronis said successfully. Early on in this process as Acronis loaded there was a messge that some drive sectors could not be read – clicked “ignore all” and things proceeded. Latest message is ” system32configsystem is corrupt’ I didn’t try to restore this as it seems to contain My Documents and other such things.
I have an Acronis image but it’s 17 days old and I will have to recreate a fair amount of work – another lesson about backing up more often.
So the question is do I have much hope of fixing things without professional help? or just give up and restore image? Any speculations on why?
Thanks for any help.
Brian S.

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It is possible you have a hardware component failing on the laptop. I would think if that is the case, RAM is usually easy to get to in a laptop, as is the HD. Other than those 2 items you might try chkdsk /r. Open a command prompt with Admin priv (right click cmd.exe and choose Run as administrator) to check the HD.

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It is possible you have a hardware component failing on the laptop. I would think if that is the case, RAM is usually easy to get to in a laptop, as is the HD. Other than those 2 items you might try chkdsk /r. Open a command prompt with Admin priv (right click cmd.exe and choose Run as administrator) to check the HD.

Thanks Ted, I wound up going to a tech – he pulled my hard drive and took off the files I needed to not lose 2 weeks work. I then restored with Acronis image and put the files back. Will report if hardware issues turn up or problem reoccurs.

Brian S

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You can copy the data you need off the hard disk to USB by booting from a recovery CD Command Prompt and using CD and COPY to collect the data.
Once you have saved your work you can restore the disk.

p.s. this is one reason I like to split my disk into Windows and Data partitions.

cheers, Paul

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I have to agree with Paul here. I also have ALL data split to a different partition (D Drive) this way I can restore my C Drive with an Up To Date image (key here is up to date) without touching the D Drive so no data is changed or lost in the restoration.

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Thanks again Ted and Paul. I’m only in range of internet sporadically so don’t always respond quickly. I think you’re right about the separate program and data drives but have never done such a thing – will try it after work busyness dies down.

Brian S

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I agree with keeping windows and data files on seperate partitions. I use a sync program to keep the “My Documents” folder backed up on a seperate drive, in real time. The online backup services seem to work rather well, but you will want to pre-encrypt your data. Different online storage companies have different encryption schemes, sometimes with them holding a “pass key” to decrypt your files if court ordered, unless you have pre-encrypted the data before they get it.

I repaired a computer with the exact same symptoms a week ago and it turned out that the problems were caused by a brownout and the platters slowed down enough to allow the head to touch the platter and destroy that sector of data. I recovered their data then ran Spin-Rite by Steve Gibson of Gibson Research to recover the lost data and recreate the sector in a different location on the platter. Then I played around with another piece of software that mapped the bad sectors onto a pictorial of platters and it was cool to see that the errors followed a curved line from inside to outside edge of platter. That told me that the head skittered off of the platter as it decelerated. After running Spin-Rite, the pc booted up normally and was fine. This is another wonderful reason to use a ups, even on laptops. Spin-Rite is also awesome for refreshing data and giving you a good idea of the exact health of the drive.

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hi nattres –

maybe after your acronis recovery you’re all set. i use acronis for my backup’s too – Win7 does image backups, but they take FOREVER !!!!!!
anyway, if you’re still snafu’ed, try runningi system file checker in the command box. open CMD and enter SFC /scannow, with the space before the “/” … it’ll check all your system files and make sure they’re intact and not corrupted. doesn’t take long at all. which is good because in XP you sort of have to sit through it, monitor it as it will ask questions about what you want to keep …

good luck,
Michael

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