So my friend's computer has been acting very strangly for quite some time now. He's been unable to boot from his harddrive. He's been getting various error messages but we've been fixing them one at a time. We've been replacing parts and finally it came down to the motherboard and cpu itself. He just got a new board and cpu and is now getting this message when he boots:

"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 select repair."


Sounds simple enough to fix. Microsoft has a simple KB article about it and so we've put the windows setup cd in and it starts loading the setup. Then before it ever gets to the windows setup menu, it comes back with yet another NTFS is corrupt message.

So we can't boot from the harddrive. We can't boot from the windows cd. WE can't do anything. I've been trying to get into the drive through various Emergency Boot CD and Ultimat Boot CD programs and nothing seems to work.

ANY help would be most welcome. Thanks in advance!!

Unfortunantly you'll probably have to reformat and reinstall. If the drive is bad enough that the Recovery Console on the CD won't work, you're pretty much SOL. You might try Knoppix or other LiveCD version of Linux to save any data files you might need though.

It's also possible that the HD itself is going bad. Did you swap it out?

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