Woot!
All right!
Yeehaw!!
I am definitely shaking my money-maker over here. I got my laptop up and running again without having to format it.
17 December – Start my computer and receive error “Windows\System32\Config\System file is either corrupted or cannot be found” and thus Windows will not load.
NOOOOOOO!!!
I just formatted this damn laptop, like three or four months ago (I think I mentioned it on the blog as well). I don’t want to do it again. I have over 3400+ songs in iTunes. The songs themselves are safe on an external drive, but do you know how long it would take to re-create all of my playlists!!??
No worries about my books. Those are backed up in two separate locations and kept on my mini, not my laptop.
I did some searching and found out this is a common error that MS knows about. The cause of which is the registry acting screwy. Due to a visiting Mommy and other wackiness, I wasn’t able to do anything about it until a few hours ago on 21 December (right in the middle of a lunar eclipse that I will run out and see as soon as I post this).
What should have been a quick, very little fuss fix became infinitely harder because the rat bastards at Toshiba don’t include a Windows XP disc with their laptops. Instead, they include some Toshiba files disc set onto which they have burned all the programs your Toshiba uses. It isn’t worth a damn and wouldn’t help me solve my problems since that disc set will not and cannot run Recovery Console.
Feeling my options were limited, I resigned myself to having to format my hard drive back to factory standard and go through no less than eight hours of software updates and restarts to get my computer functioning the way it was before it went screwy. Before all of that, I made a quick trip to Best Buy to buy a hard drive enclosure kit so I could remove my hard drive from my laptop, slave it out to my mini, and get my files and data.
A silver lining appeared before I followed through with the great erasure. Flash (Stephanie Burke) had a copy of Windows XP that I could use to run Recovery Console. Good old Dell, which is what she owns. Can’t go wrong with them.
So I borrowed her copy of XP, ran Recovery Console, followed the directions listed on the MS site, copied and deleted files, and got my computer running again.
No lost files, everything is running, and I promptly ran every single Norton cleaning utility I own to make sure it won’t happen again.
Now I’m off to stare at the lunar eclipse for a few minutes. I would gawk longer since this is a monumental event (last lunar eclipse that happened on the winter solstice was in the 1600’s), but it’s freezing outside.
ugh- computer stuff. I'm am absolutely no good at it. My desktop crashed, thanks to a virus that my son accidentally clicked on. A window popped up, saying my computer was infected, to click for a scan and it would take care of it…unfortunately, that WAS the virus. I was able to save the pictures onto my external drive before everything completely crashed, but now i'm worried that my external harddrive is infected. I'm afraid to open it up.
My father came down to visit and ended up buying a new harddrive for me, installed it, did all the updates…I would never have been able to do this on my own. I wouldn't have had the patience. I definitely didn't have the money. Luckily for me, my dad figured it all out, and on top of that my son bought me a laptop to use for when I can't sit in a chair….thank God for sons and dads.
I totally respect you for being able to do all the work on the computer yourself. I'm afraid that I'll always be computer-un-friendly.
Mardel – It took a little while to learn. I was calling tech support a lot back when I was younger, but I just remembered everything they told me so I would never have to call again since I hate talking on the phone (unless it's with someone I know well).
Most viruses attack the operating system, not so much the files. So if you can access the hard drive without running the OS, file retrieval isn't that hard.
I'm glad your son and dad were able to help.
~ Renee