Last month I turned on my computer one afternoon, and it would not boot. I was receiving the error message: ...the following file is missing or corrupt... (\windows\system32\config\system). I never was able to figure our what was causing the problem. I even tried all of the possible solutions listed on this site. I eventually decided to reformat my hard drive, and start over. After re-formatting the drive, and re-installing windows, the same error message returned within two days. This happened about a dozen times over the next several weeks. I finally decided to try to reformat in DOS, instead of using the Windows XP disk, and so far it seems to have worked. Here is my new problem. I have two hard drives. Ever since I began having these problems, my second hard drive has listed itself as unformatted. If I try to look at it throught windows, say in My Computer, it says that the drive is unformatted, and asks if I would likke to format it. If I try to look at it in DOS it says that the drive is of an unknown format, and can not be read. I was very careful not to do anything to this drive while trying to figure out what was initially wrong with my computer. I can't figure out how this could have happened, or how to fix it. I'd hate to lose all the data on that hard drive, since I used it for data backup.

sounds like that drive has a corrupted boot sector, stemming from possible physical damage to the media.

It sounds like you have a whole bunch of layered problems. If only DOS did not see your HD, that would mean it is formatted in NTFS which DOS does not recognize. Apparently your OS sees the HD but says it is not formatted. An easy thing to try is to turn your computer off and reseat the connectors to the drive and to the MOBO. If you did not make any changes to the drive it should be OK. In the future, boot from the Win CD and before you reformat your HD on which you have the OS, you should try the repair option on the CD. Follow the instructions and when Windows finds a current copy of itself, it will give you repair as one of the options. When you install in that way it will not bother any of your data or registry files but will take care of any corrupted system files by reinstalling(overwriting). The fact that your computer keeps crashing after you reformatted and reinstalled indicates that you have hardware or incompatible driver problems. You gave no information about your system, so it is difficult to offer any more help.

I have an XP PC with a couple of IDE hard drives in it. The C drive is NTFS and the D drive is FAT32. Earlier today it declared that my D Drive was gone and needed to be reformatted out of the blue. I took it out of that PC threw it in another PC (a Win98 PC) and it saw all the data on the drive in the Win98 PC. I copied the data to that hard drive and will restore it once it is fixed in the XP system. When I ran Partition Magic against it on the Win98 PC it said the same thing as XP. Drive needs to be formatted. So I think XP has a bug which flags drives as unformatted when it encounters a situation it can't deal with. And oh by the way I run a UPS on the XP PC so it shouldn't be having weird problems like this. I am not sure what I will do to fix the drive (either format or repair but will likely make it an NTFS drive this time for sure). I use Retrospect backup where I duplicate my hard drives to other hard drives (they are so cheap now) but had no copy of this drive as I had not installed retrospect on this PC because it is so new. I also read where on another board where XP did this unformat trick to someone else's hard drive. My initial conclusion is XP may be solid from a rebooting perspective but sucks from a file handling one. Never had this problem with all of my Win98 PCs and I run 7 concurrently on my network. I know it doesn't fix the original problem above but just wanted to warn that everyone who is running XP needs a bullet proof backup system.