crossposted from Moe's:
So I'm fixing a friend's laptop (Dell Inspiron E1705). When I first got it, it would get an error on boot that NTOSKRNL was corrupt or missing. Tried copying over a new one from my XP Pro SP2 CD and still got the same error.
Nuked that partition, created a new one and booted from his Dell provided XP MCE install disc. Have a couple hiccups along the way, as I get prompted to find the location of various files and I have to manually point it to \I386 for them. Install finishes, and I get a new error, that Windows\System32\Config\System is missing or corrupt.
Odds things: They have the hard drive split into 4 partitions, 1 called MEDIADIRECT thats FAT32 and sized 2047 MB, 1 FAT partition thats 47 MB, another FAT32 thats 5020 MB, and finally the C: partition thats NTFS and 107356 MB.
So anyone got any ideas what I can do to fix this damn thing?
Posts
Do this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545
However, if you're getting it immediately after a reformat, then you've either got a bad Windows disc, bad hardware, or you're doing something seriously wrong during the install.
I have no idea why they have anything formatted in FAT32, other than that it might be some kind of Dell restore partition.
Ah, here we go.
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm
Better question, can I just use my XP Pro SP2 CD and use his CD key from MCE, or use my key and then change it to his afterwards?
See how many books I've read so far in 2010