Comp. Geeks, quick question

[GarrettM]

My extra chromosome toting friend gave me his laptop to fix. It has XP Professional and when you start it up it says NTDLR.EXE is missing or corrupt please reinstall. I don't have a XP Pro disc so I downloaded like 4 different versions and burnt them to a CD, (It has a legit Serial on the bottom), and NONE of them worked. They all gave me different errors. Then I tried my XP Home disc which I used 10minutes before to install Home on my computer. It gave me an error after going through the setup to the point where it copies files, says "The following file is missing or corrup: \Windows\System32\c_1252.nls
You can attempt to repair it by pressing "R"

I press R and it just restarts. And now I am outa ideas as to what is wrong! RAM? HD?

[James Crivellone]

its toast, don't even bother trying to repair.

You need a Windows XP Professional OEM disk

[browntown]

delete partition, create new one, format said partition, install legit copy of xp, set static swap file, defragment, tell your buddy to stop hanging out on warez and porn sites. install ad-aware and HJT. Disable all non-essential services, give yourself admin rights, and the owner limited rights. Give it back to him and tell him he's only allowed plain text email, secure websites, and ms office for school.

[Farbin Kaiber]

Now thats pwnership right there.

[equate975]

delete partition, create new one, format said partition, install legit copy of xp, set static swap file, defragment, tell your buddy to stop hanging out on warez and porn sites. install ad-aware and HJT. Disable all non-essential services, give yourself admin rights, and the owner limited rights. Give it back to him and tell him he's only allowed plain text email, secure websites, and ms office for school.

No, you need to rebuild the master boot record.

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/483/xp_repair_fix_master_boot_record_recovery_console

Either that or you left a floppy or something stupid in the drive, cd, usb etc. Shit happens all the time at work.

[TwoJ's]

Or find the right torrent for xp pro, download, burn .iso and throw it in there. Bam.

[equate975]

All the solutions except mine make you lose all the data too.

[GarrettM]

Now it won't even read CD. I has the XP home disc in there for shits and giggles and it says "Disc Read Error, Press CTRL+ALT+DLT to retry"

[s0urce]

1.See if you can boot a live distro of linux.
2. If the Master boot record is corrupt, I suggest bootmaster partition recovery. 3. If data recovery is crucial, I suggest buying a new HDD, format and install windows. Try mounting the old NTFS as a slave to copy over what you need.

[Julien]

i'm saying that laptop has a shitty stick of ram, try to swap one out.

[Charlie]

If it's a laptop, he probably dropped it and fucked one of the platters. Now he's got a nicely trashed group of sectors that formerly contained the MBR.

See if you can get the HD warrantied & FFR the bitch.

-Charlie

[HST]

Ram is my first bet. Then HD.

[Jean]

So many things that can be wrong... if you need to test ram and don't have any tools, google memtest86. You can download iso free (legit) and burn to make a bootable cd. There are also ways to install a laptop hdd on a different PC to virus scan/transfer data. There are also Winternal tools out there that let you boot from CD into GUI to attempt repair or recovery.

Do mem and hdd tests first, like other suggested. If you already tried to reload, there is a chance you already screwed it up. You need OEM cd like Jordan said in order for the printed legit key to work.

[redhatpat]

Install Linux and tell your friend to stop fucking around with that Microsoft shit.

[Charlie]

Install Linux and tell your friend to stop fucking around with that Microsoft shit.

Because MSFT is the cause of a hard disk failure.

-Charlie