Restored ntfs.sys, but... no joy

Windows XP

My system crashed and unable to reboot. Error message states: "System32\Drivers\Ntsf.sys is missing or corrupt."
Following the guidelines of Microsoft Article ID 555531 I restored the file ntsf.sys using the Recovery Panel from my original Windows installation CD. All seemed to go well, except... I still have the same problem: no boot - same error message. Repeated the restore file process and still no luck. :cry

Any ideas? :confused

By the way, I thought my system was FAT32. So why would it care about missing ntsf file? How can I tell whether my system is FAT32 or NTSF? I tried looking in the BIOS setup, but saw no obvious indications.

 

You need your PC to boot first to find out what system it's running, if you can get it booted follow these instructions to find out i FAT32 or NTFS

Right click in My Computer and go to Manage
Then in Computer management select Disk management
This will give you a list of your drives and under File system it will tell you if it is FAT32 or NTFS

 

Thanks for the advise on my secondary inquiry. I will confirm this, if and when I am able to reboot. Presently, I cannot reboot - so the FAT32 vs NTFS question is moot.

The vexing thing is that the error message I'm getting seems contradictory to what I can see from the Windows recovery panel. The error message says that "System32\Drivers\Ntsf.sys is missing or corrupt." However, I copied that file from the original Windows installation disk and put it into the required subdirectory on my hard drive. Then, I verified that it was there using the DIR command - the response would seem to indicate that the file is there, and since it was freshly copied directly from the CD-ROM I don't know how it could be corrupt.

Tonight I plan to follow the instructions given in an article titled "Repairing Windows XP in Eight Commands", that was linked to in a related post here. Meanwhile, if anyone has any other ideas, please let me know. THANKS!

 

Thanks, Running CHKDSK /R was one of the first things I had already tried. It found and fixed some things, but not the root cause of my problem.

Since then I have recompiled the BOOT.INI, file using BOOTCFG /REBUILD and FIXBOOT, as described in the Icrontic Teck article titled "Repairing Windows XP in Eight Commands". Those guidelines included the CHKDSK command for good measure.

Reading the article gave me high hopes. Except for an apparent typo in the next to last step, it seemed straightforward enough. The apparent typo addresses options for the CHKDSK command. It says to type CHKDSK /R /F. However no such /F option. Only other one is /P and that is implied if one sets /R - so /F would be superfluous. Anyway, the rest of the procedure sounded promising. I ran through it - twice...

... no joy. Now I'm think it's about time to fold and simply use the "set up Windows XP" option from the Windows Recovery Console, instead of the repair option. Adding to my consternation, I could not proceed because set up would not respond to <f2>, from either keyboard I tried, and <f2> is required to accept the EULA to continue. Set up responded nominally to <Esc> from the keyboard, so it's not bad keyboard. ARGHHH!!:cry

One thing that I haven't tried is FIXMBR, because I was intimidated by the message "this computer appears to have a non-standard or invalid master boot record. FIXMBR may damage your partition tables if you proceed. This could, blah, blah, blah... are you sure?" Is this is a last resort, I might try it. Alternatively, to minimize data loss, should I pull this hard drive, and then install Windows onto a different, freshly formatted drive?

Incidentally, did all the above, I read the suggestion from plodr. I figured what the heck, let me run CHKDSK again. This time it reported "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems." This just keeps getting better :banghead

 

meant <f8> above. Oops! Sorry.