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!)