I have a 3 year old Dell Dimension 8100 (1.8GHz processor, 512mb ram, 60gb Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive, 32mb NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 4X AGP graphics card, 48x cd drive)that had run W2K Professional through its entire life. Over the past few months it began to have problems (hanging when trying to reboot, etc). Until finally last month it wouldn't boot up and I was getting a "Windows cannot start because the following file is either missing or corrupt.." message. I decided to start over. I upgraded to WXP Professional (formatted the drive and installed clean). Everything has worked fine for the past month. Until this morning. When I went to use the computer it was frozen. The mouse moved, but that's all. I had IE6 open and Musicmatch Jukebox. (By the way, I have loaded nothing to this computer except MusicMatch, drivers for an Epson scanner and an Olympus sigital camera). I was forced to pull the plug. When it tried to reboot I got the error message "Windows cannot start because the following file is missing or corrupt. windows\system32\config\system", and no file was specified. I tried reinstalling XP Pro but it said things were so messed up that I would need to reformat and start over. My question is this:
Does anyone have an idea of what causes this? Could it be a bad hard drive (although I did a chkdsk last month and it came up clean) or some other hardware in the computer?
If I reformat and reload XP, what measures should I take to ensure I can reboot and fix any problem like this without having to blow all my stuff away? I was lucky this time because there really is nothing on the computer that I don't have backed up. Is there a boot or recovery disk I can make?
Thanks for your help.
Does anyone have an idea of what causes this? Could it be a bad hard drive (although I did a chkdsk last month and it came up clean) or some other hardware in the computer?
If I reformat and reload XP, what measures should I take to ensure I can reboot and fix any problem like this without having to blow all my stuff away? I was lucky this time because there really is nothing on the computer that I don't have backed up. Is there a boot or recovery disk I can make?
Thanks for your help.