Strange happenings at work

We have a new password protected wireless network at work, which me and a collegue also use via our laptops. Yesterday my collegue re-boots his laptop after some windows updates had finished installing and gets the error : System config file missing. This resulted in windows failing to boot. I located the missing file on my laptop but windows wouldnt let me copy it so all he could do was use his rescue disc's but this meant he lost a lot stuff including days of CG work.

I'm a little worried to say the least. I'm not sure the works wireless network is as secure as it could be and I'm now dubious about installing windows updates! How does a little file in the system32/config folder just dissappear?

I'm just really glad it was'nt me, as I did have hours of un-backed up sound recording on my laptop at the time, needless to say before I re-booted last night I rar'ed and burnt my sound engineering drive! Fortunatley it was fine, I've never been so happy to see my windows log in screen.

If anyone could shed a little light or offer some extra security advice for wirless networks that would be great, Rhyth.

It could be a heat issue or maybe memory problem on his laptop I don't know for sure but just a guess. I don't think it's anything wireless related though. Next time you had similar problem, use something like knoppix to copy only necesary file over via floppy or something. That way you won't lose any valuable data on your hdd.

Can you use a cd as the laptops we use don't have floppy?

If you have 2cd's you can(one is occupied by knoppix), but it can be anything like usb stick, removable drive etc as long as your bios support them.

As in boot from? Virtual ones arnt going to be any good are they.

Sorry I'm terrible at explaining things:p But basically what you have to do is boot from another source so that you can copy necessary file to your original hdd(which you're having problem with)There are some ways to do this and one is using install-free OS like knoppix but you will need another device to physically hold your files because it's on cd-rom. Another way is to boot directly from external removable drives and copy files from there(but your bios needs to support this feature). All virtual drives are only sofware emulated drives so they cannot be used in this case.

That happened to our PC at home, my mum isn't at all impressed as I can't help her until I get back home.

But after a restart (after doing nothing) it just came up with that error.

I must admit very strange indeed!

Ian

Came up with 'The following file is missing or corrupt' and it was in the same directory as yours :s