[JudyR]

Went home for lunch. Screen saver is frozen. No mouse cursor.
Running Win XP on a 1.8g Pentium. (or 1.7 I forget - whatever, it's plenty fast).
So I soft boot.
Didn't even watch it boot, came back into the room, there's a message: cannot find win.com
huh?
soft boot again.
Comes up with the start menu with options (safe mode, etc.) and option 5 highlighted.
This option is for command prompt only. "Run ScanReg". Chose option 5.
Tried to run ScanReg, says: Cannot find win/himem.sys and 2 other sys files.
Hard booted, same response. Tried other start options. Can't find windows. :blush:
Hard booted, same response.
Do I need to re-install XP? And how do I do that exactly?

JUDY

 

[V0lt]

Sounds like a bunch of your system files got deleted...try booting off of the XP disk and see if there is an option to install XP over your current copy without deleting all of your files. I think there is a way to do this, but I'm not sure. I bet someone else will know how to do that, but I don't have XP so I'm not familiar with how to do it.

In any case, good luck

 

[johnwill]

You can boot off the CD and try to do a repair installation, which will hopefully keep your configuration intact. There's no way to know what happened, or how much damage was done, so this is somewhat of a crapshoot. If it were my system, I'd use Norton GHOST to make an image of what you have now, so you don't lose any more data, then try the repair. Even if you have to reinstall, the GHOST image will contain all of your stuff that's left, so you can explore it and restore data.