Okay, so where to start... Up until yesterday, I'd had 2 Geforce 6600s in an SLI config. Yesterday, I bought an 8800 and planned to replace them, but the north bridge fan on my a8n-sli motherboard, wouldn't allow the card to fit. After much creative effort, I finally decided that I would replace the fan with a shorter one and put one 6600 back in the machine for the time being. I didn't get a fan, but a heatsink instead. Put the heatsink the north bridge, tossed in the 8800 and started the PC up to see this message: Windows could not start - file is missing or corrupt: system32\drivers\pci.sys Okay, so I swapped the 8800 back out for the 6600, and still received the message. So I start researching and people suggest I boot with the XP CD and copy the file over. Did that, but I receive the same error. Further research suggests that it's likely a hardware issue. So I pull all the cards out one at a time, try all the different PCIe cards - I had three. I try swapping out all the RAM, but no luck. I still get the error. Somewhere I read that the mobo might be messed up, so I figured the heatsink wasn't enough to cool the northbridge and the chip got fried. Luckily, a friend had the exact motherboard, so I swapped it out with mine. He even had some different memory I swapped in, but no change. Finally, I figure I'll perform an in-place upgrade of windows. So I boot from the CD, repair the current version and it does its thing. First reboot, and the computer complains again, this time the error is: Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: System32\Drivers\nvatabus.sys Anyway, it was mid-windows reinstall, so when I go back to try another in-place upgrade, it only sees a partition. No existing install of windows. Ugh. So I research this nvatabus error, and locate a copy of the file to transfer over, but, of course, I can't access the windows directory to copy it over. In fact, I have no idea what portion (if any) of windows exists atm. I hate to just install a fresh version of windows, but it looks like it's come to that. I've read some stuff that suggests the hard drive might be bad. I ran chkdsk from the repair console, and it said it repaired at least one item. otherwise, things seemed fine. I guess what I'm wondering is, should I be looking for a new HDD to install windows on and rescue what I can from my current drive or does it seem like this situation arose from the whole video card fiasco? Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, ben Machine specs: Win XP Pro Asus A8N-SLI 120GB ATA100 WD HDD 2GB Crucial PC3200 RAM Athlon 4800+ Geforce 6600 256MB

You have an Nvidia chipset equipped motherboard. You will need SP2 or higher with the nvidia chipset drivers. I have had this issue with nvidia chipsets and it crashing out during the install process. You can also download the pre-release CD of SP3, or stream it to an SP2 CD. SP3 has the drivers on it. It could also be a hardware error or other issue, but I have seen this exact error before. Which version of windows XP are you installing? original, SP1, SP2?

I had SP2 installed before this stuff went down, and I was in the midst of installing SP2 again when this happened. I've swapped out nearly every piece of hardware imaginable, so I can't imagine that it's something hardware related. My only thought is that maybe I needed to update the Nforce drivers before I tried to install the 8800, and that did something bad. I'm about to throw in a new hard drive and attempt to install windows on that. We'll see if that works.... Thanks for your input.

maybe something corrupted the nvidia drivers and windows isnt replacing them with a re-install? Good luck

Just installed Windows on a new drive and things are working now. I'd sure be interested in knowing whether it's the 8800 that threw things for a loop. Thanks for your help!