Tag Archives: recovery

Apple Mac: don’t lose your OS X recovery disks

Computer Aid Posted on by

I was recently asked to re-install OS X on an older iMac G5.

Problem was that the owner had lost the recovery disks.

He had a mate that lent him the recovery disks to a slightly later model of iMac… but he couldn’t get it to work.

I had a quick go, but booting from the recovery disk gave the error:

OS-X cannot be installed on this computer

I decide to check the net, and I find out that you need to use the exact same version of recovery disks that you get with the computer.

It seems like recovery disks are computer type specific.

The moral of the story is: if you own a Mac computer, don’t lose the recovery disks, otherwise fixing some problems can become very difficult… or you can try installing yellow dog linux!

ntldr is missing (severe partition corruption)

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer is unable to start her PC. It says NTLDR is missing.

She also tried connecting it to another, older, PC, but it would only show up as a 10Mb drive (its actually a 160Gb maxtor).

She also tried the acer recovery CD, but it wanted to reformat the whole drive before installing windows… so she said no to that.

I figure if its just a ntldr corruption, it should be easy to get everything back to normal.

I need to take the PC back to the office, and connecting the drive to a different PC does indeed show only a 10Mb FAT partition.

At least the drive doesn’t seem to be about to fail.

I start the recovery process, and soon find lots of ntfs data on the drive.

I call the customer, and given the importance of the data, she says to go ahead with the data recovery.

During the recovery process, I only get 1 read error, and I am able to recover most of the data, but most of the top-level folder names seem to be lost (except for windows, informed, and two others). I suspect the MFT has been lost.

Anyway, she quickly got her data back (on 2 dvds), but most of the data is in folders with names like [001D56].

Its not nice, but its the best that can be done without spending days reconstructing the data.

I suspect that plugging the drive into another (older) computer actually made the drive worse (as I’ve actually done something similar myself)…

Never plug a “potentially” corrupt drive into an older PC… it can make things worse.

file is missing or corrupt: windowssystem32configsystem

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer cannot start up his PC:

Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: windowssystem32configsystem

I start bartPE, and the windowssystem32config folder seems empty. Normally only 1 or 2 files are corrupt, but I find that the whole folder is empty.

I get the needed files from system volume information, but I get an error when trying to copy them to the config folder.

I just rename the folder, and create a new config folder, then copy the files (and rename them appropriately).

After that, windows restarts without the corrupt error, but a scandisk springs into action during the startup.

After the startup, I see the missing files in the renamed config folder have suddenly reappeared.

So it looks like the config folder was corrupt, so windows couldn’t start up to run a scandisk…

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this scenario?

I would have thought that a scandisk should be able to operate virtually stand-alone, without needing the registry hives. After all, they get written fairly often, so they are prime candidates for corruption…

Thinking back to my unix admin days, I remember unix would first start a very basic shell, and run a dskchk if it was needed, before the unix kernel itself was loaded. The basic shell, chkdsk, the kernel loader (and a few other tools) would almost never need to be altered, so they were highly unlikely to become corrupt.

I wonder if vista is any better? (I suspect not!)