I need some help! Our network server has gone down and I believe the hard drive has become corrupted. I say this because I get the msg "missing or corrupt file: windows\system32\config\system". I know there is a fix for the corrupted registry, but it doesn't work on this computer. I can't run any commands that invovle copying files or writing data to the drive. I can run the command DIR to view a directory, but nothing that involves writing to the disk. Also, I ran the setup disk and when it gets to the point of creating partitions for the install, it doesn't recognize the current partition as being either NTFS, FAT, or anything else for that matter. Naturally, There is some data that needs to be recovered. I am wondering if I run the setup program, is it possible to recreate the partition, reinstall Windows, and keep all of the data intact? Can I run the setup program over the existing install and just repair corrupt files and partitions without losing the data? Any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Charles

If you want to recover data the worse thing you can do is write information to the disk. Your best bet is get one of the disk recovery utilities available on the web and access the disk from floppy or cd. So no backups of the server? Ouch! Golly gee wilerkers everyone. Learn to Internet Search

Hey thanks! This is a small office with about ten employees and they never thought about anything like this. They didn't have any "IT guy" at all until I came along a couple of weeks ago. And I'm more of a tech, not an administrator. But I'm learning very rapidly. Can you give me the name of a couple of these utilities?

charles, this may be fixable, but unlikely. Try this anyway: Boot using your Windows Server CD, select Repair using Recovery Console. Then at command prompt type chkdsk /f When that completes, run chkdsk /r These may take a long time depending on your drive (my 40gb IDE took 2 hours) When complete, cross fingers, reboot.

Hey thanks, I appreciate the info. As you suggested, I did run chkdsk and it couldn't even get 30% through the disk before it crapped out. I'm trying to get this Ultimate Windows Boot CD (very handy tool for free on the Internet) to work hoping that maybe I can just somehow examine the few files that we need and extract them. Thanks. I appreciate all of the responses!