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Thread: Windows not booting- missing SYSTEM

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    Now with added sobriety Rave's Avatar
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    Windows not booting- missing SYSTEM

    Hi, just a quickie to see if anyone can help. Some friends of mine have a Tiny laptop which has stopped booting. It's a bit of a silly laptop anyway- with a 3GHz desktop Prescott and R9700 graphics it's a total lap burner, and often switches itself off through overheating. It probably needs stripping to get the dust out.

    Anyway, recently it refused to boot, showing an error that said that "SYSTEM" was missing or corrupt. It also said that we could repair the problem with the windows install disk supplied with the computer. According to my friends they weren't given the disk whenthey bought it, they would have had to pay an extra £200 for it. Quite how Tiny get away with charging £200 for a £70 XP home disk when they've already put the operating system on the computer is beyond me. Still, I hear they're well known as a dodgy outfit.

    So, anyway, I went round with one of my XP disks and tried to get it to do a repair install. Nothing doing, it must be a different version, and it didn't spot an XP install to repair. So then I tried copying over every file called system that I could find on it. I may not have copied SYSTEM.in_, which I believe from subsequent research is the file I need. Is that likely to work? Is there some method of copying over the files that I need to use? I heard that I need to use EXPAND, or something, but just copying the files manually from the dos prompt seemed to work fine.

    If that isn't going to work, is there anything else I can try? Because otherwise I'm looking at a complete re-install of Windows, which will be a bit of a PITA because then I'll have to reinstall all their programs, broadband etc. etc..

    I've left it a bit late to post this, I'm due round there this evening to have another go, so if anyone can help please post now, cheers.

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    Re: Windows not booting- missing SYSTEM

    Sadly sounds like a reinstall is the only thing left to do. Repair on an xp disc in my experience is usually very good at fixing minor problems with an install such as a few files missing but not to good at restoring anything greater such as missing folders I guess you attempted copying over both system and system32?

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    Re: Windows not booting- missing SYSTEM

    files ending with underscore are compressed, and will not work without being expanded

    and system.ini is a relic from windows 3.x, and won't be making a difference to bootability

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