after checking connections around my hard disk drives i turned my computer back on and up comes this message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

System32\Drivers\Ntfs.sys

You can attempt to repair this file by starting windows setup using the original setup CD-ROM
Select "r" at the first screen to start repair.


Upon putting the xp disc in, it boots to the cd, and it looks at my hardware configuration and the Windows Setup blue screen appears to tell me

File setupdd.sys could not be loaded. The error code is 4. Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit.

Please help! perhaps the casing that holds the drives and floppy was shaken? i've checked to make sure everything is in place.

Clueless James

Well, I hope you looked at www.gidforums.com - we've been discussing this problem for the past ages!

What did you do to your computer, install new hardware or something? We saw here that this is a hardware flaw, evident since the bootable CDROM fails to run successfully. Dodgy memory is the most common source of this error.

Try testing each of your memory sticks in turn, see if you can single out which is not working. Otherwise your harddisk may be damaged (a shake of 2 shouldn't cause any damage, especially if it's off)
GF

Garth,

I didn't add any hardware to my machine, I opened the box to see what make my harddrive was. After I rebooted and had the error message I opened it back up and noticed that the black plastic casing surrounding the hardrive was broken. . on one of the corners the plastic has broken around the screw holding it in place. You can lift it up around the screw. i hardly think this is would couse any trouble.

So I came home from work yesterday and turned it back on and the OS loaded just fine. This leads me to believe whenever I move the box around it's going to be hit or miss having the computer boot up correctly. I also made sure the xp setup disc would load okay and decided to re-install xp for the hell of it.

So, it's functional now, but who knows if I need to get around it or bump it accidently. .

I opened a new thread on this matter simply because all the other messages surrounding this scenario involved converting a fat32 drive to ntfs, which I didn't do. I'll be more thorough in searching around next time.

James

I've had a similar problem. But I've never had this before. I came to my computer after leaving it on and it had this ntfs.sys error message and was asking for a boot disk I think. So I restarted it with a win 98 boot disk in so I could get to the open cd-rom menu to run the XP disk. It got so far then it said something about FAT32 being corrupted so i can't run the disk either. Is it worth checking out the hard drive in case it's a physical problem? I've just uploaded loads of holiday photos so I'm absolutely gutted if this means my hard drive is buggered.

Thanks - Mike.

What got so far? A windows 98 bootdisk should run correctly & boot the system to DOS prompt. But if you converted your drive to NTFS, then you won't be able to read it using DOS. Also the DOS will get in the way of the XP install program.

Boot using the XP install disk (don't use a boot disk, have the disk in the drive on startup - you may need to change the boot order in the BIOS settings), and go into the recovery console there. And run the chkdsk command from there.

This should repair the drive enough to boot the system. There may be something screwing up your drive, so a full reinstall would help.
GF

If you mean the XP cd then it doesn't make a difference when I put the disk in on startup or not. It doesn't even get to xp's start up. It just goes from checking the RAM and all that stuff then gives me the error message as if it's in DOS again. I'm really stuck. Chkdsk does nothing and neither does scan disk.

Oh yeah, because my c: drive is now virtual and also it didn't say that FAT32 was corrupt after I put a Win 98 disk in. It said it couldn't read it and said I should run Fdisk. But that would mean formatting. And I need the files on there. NIGHTMARE!!!!