Yes, we want to save as much information as possible. I’m not sure if some of your answers were an “automatic” response, but it looks like the only thing I haven’t tried is putting this godforesaken drive in a USB Caddy to see if I can save the file. The PCI device is one of the On Board components which is giving the problems so that’s why you are unable to find the problem and it may very well prove useful to run some diagnostics on the computer while you are recovering the DATA on another machine so you could boot off The Ultimate Boot CD and run some M’Board Diagnostic while the data is being saved elsewhere You can perform an In Place Install by following the directions here but if EFS has been used you’ll loose the Encryption Key and all the data will be gibberish so you need to save it first on a different computer via a USB CaddyĪs time is money and you need to work fast I would suggest saving the data wiping the drive with a utility like Boot & Nuke which writes zeros to every sector of the HDD and the rebuild the Software package from there Honestly it’s faster and less strain on yourself once you have the data saved.īut if you like you can try the above methods of recovering that Windows Install or you may like to try this Recovering from a Corrupted Registery If they have used the Encrypted File System you’ll need to save the Encryption Key by following the directions here If the User has made the files Private you’ll need to take ownership of the files by following the directions here If it’s very badly remove the HDD fit it to USB Caddy and then attach it to another computer and save the data. Anyone have any other suggestions? Or is she hosed?

I also tried hooking this specific IDE drive up as a slave in another PC and it won’t boot when it’s hooked up. So I can’t even access the Windows Recovery Console. Well, as soon as I do that, it just sits there… for hours.

So I threw in a Windows XP CD and when it got to the part where it gives you options what to do, I chose to run the Windows Recovery Console by hitting the “R” button. I was told then to run Windows Recovery Console and then expand the pci.sys file back to her hard drive. I then tried taking out some RAM modules. So I first tried taking all fo the PCI devices out (there wasn’t many, since most were onboard) that didn’t work.

She the proceeded to tell me that her screen now says, “Missing or corrupt pci.sys file, load Windows XP and run repair”. I sure hope someone else has! At work, one of our administrators computer “crashed”. I’ve been in the IT industry a while, and I haven’t seen this one before.

Xp recovery console usb stick