Missing or Corrupted Files

Hi,
Does anyone know how to reinstall missing or corrupted files in Windows XP Home Edition when you don't have a Windows XP CD (OEM preloaded Windows XP Home)?

Thanks for any help.

 

Hello jslow,

How to use the sfc command http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?threadid=20877,

I'm not sure if the XP disc is needed to be present whether or not it finds a file in the cache. You should get a XP disc in any case.

Regards - Charles

 

Hi Charles,
Thanks for the reply.
I tried the sfc file checker a couple of times now but it doesn't reinstall missing files.

Thanks

 

Yep,
The sfc will expect the OS disk to be present. You may be sitting there for some time telling it to replace missing/corrupted files. There is no option to set it up automatically.
If the original disk doesn't contain SP1 and your current system does then would suggest you burn an slipstreamed disk or you should re-run SP1 after replacing files with sfc.

 

If XP came preinstalled, you should have some sort of recovery/restore CD with the operating system (XP) on it. System File Checker will use that disk unless it's a Compaq and all you have is the Recovery CD. That CD doesn't have much on it; just enough to access the data on the small harddrive partition.

However, the files you need from the XP CD are probably on the harddrive in the I386 folder. I've not had any reason to use SFC so I don't know for sure if it can be pointed at that folder to extract the files you need but I know it can be done in Win98 and I found these instructions for W2k:

"The Windows 2000 source location is stored in the following registry location and can be modified to point to the drive letter of a volume that has an I386 flat folder of the installation files

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\SourcePa
th:REG_SZ:<drive letter>:

where drive letter is the appropriate drive letter. After Rebooting, WFP and SFC /SCANNOW will use the new source path instead of prompting for the installation CD-ROM. "

I see no reason why it wouldn't work for XP as well.

I did find the same key in my XP registry and it's pointing to D:\ so if you have the I386 folder, you could change that to "C:\I386" (without the quotes and where C: is the drive where the folder is located) and see if that works. If it doesn't, you can always change it back.

 

Hi Miz & Paul,
Thanks for the replies.
I have an IBM NetVista computer and it came with a separate partition which holds the Recovery Data. I also requested & received the Recovery Data on two CD's.
I've tried Start, Run, CMD, then sfc /scannow and I get a dialog box that advises that it is checking files but when it completes, the box disappears and there is no report or anything. It never asks for a Windows XP CD. I really don't know what happens.

If I click on "Winnt32.exe" in C:\i386, I get the following error message before and after running sfc /scannow:

"Windows Setup
The option to upgrade will not be available at this time because Setup was unable to load the file:
C:\i386\WINNTUPG\NETUPGRD.DLL
The system cannot find the file specified ".

Any suggestions?
Thanks

 

jslow - normal behavior for sfc it it doesn't find any files it needs to replace is just to run and then quit. Frustrating and I wish there were a "verbose" option so it would tell you what it was doing but none that I can find.

Do you have reason to suspect that you have bad/corrupt/wrong version system files that do need replacing? It doesn't happen often since XP will fix this sort of thing on the fly during normal computing and not give you any message that it replaced a file.

 

Hi Newt,
Thanks for the reply.
I am missing a file as noted in my previous post.
Right now I would just like to replace the missing file, but I can't find a way of doing this in Windows XP Home.

Thanks

 

A version of the old SFC in Win9x can be found in XP's msconfig.

Start>Run>msconfig>OK, then click on the "Expand File" button. That will let you enter the name of the file you want to extract, where to extract it from and where to extract it to.

 

Hi Miz,
Thanks for the reply.
I tried your suggestion but I didn't have any success.
I can find no way to get to the files I need from the Recovery Partition (IBM) or from the Product Recovery CD's furnished by IBM.
In Windows 98SE I could do a partial recovery from IBM's Product Recovery CD to replace missing or corrupt files. IBM advised you can do this from a Windows XP CD but they don't furnish one with their computers.
They recommended doing a full Recovery which means I would lose all data and software that I installed.

Thanks