Hi Folks,

I have seen many posts on this error but not anything quite like mine!

When booting windows 2000 professional from Dell Latitude d400 I am recieving the error Windows 2000 could not start missing or corrupt winnt\system32\config\system.

I gather that to fix this I need to access to the recovery console from my windows setup disk. When trying this (from both CD and 4 floppy boot discs) I get the blue screen of death and the stop error 0x0000007B when it gets to the starting up windows point.

I have tried accessing the hard drive from a DOS utility from bootdisk.com and get the error 'Invalid drive specification'

I have then tried testdisk from which I am able to find the hard drive and peruse the file system.

I have no idea where to go next - does anybody have any ideas??

Cheers Folks
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The last time I saw this error it was bad ram. And it was on a laptop, an HP that belonged to a friend of mine in my case.

It was easy to verify that it was the ram, since not even live Linux or Disk Utility CDs like the Ultimate Boot Cd would boot up.

What happens with bad ram is that the system starts to load itself into the ram, then hits the bad sectors, and fails to continue, and since the registry is the first thing to load, you get the error you're getting.

So check the ram first. If you get a failure to start using simple tools like ultimate boot cd, or any live linux cd, it's almost certainly bad ram.

When I opened the HP, I was dismayed to discover that they are using total garbage ram now, Nanya in this case, which doesn't have any user serviceable warranty on it at all, and only has a 1 year warranty through the company that buys it, hp etc.

If it's the ram, replace it with good ram unless machine is still under warranty, good is crucial, kingston, corsair, infineon, muskkin. Good ram comes with a lifetime warranty, by the way.

If the laptop has two pieces of ram, it's easy to test this, just remove one, then restart, if same issue, remove the other, then restart. That will usually pinpoint it since it's very unlikely both will fail.
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You can also try running these commands from a CMD window to rebuild the boot sectors, but you will need a bootable CD or DVD so you can get to the C:\ prompt.

C:\
Bootrec.exe /fixmbr
Bootrec.exe /fixboot
Chkdsk /r
Press Enter after each command and wait until it finishes and the C:\ prompt reappears before doing the next one. Then reboot normally.


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