Computer crash looking for sys file

[sbatchelor]

A friend of mine has a computer and says her daughter was working on it and it crashed with a black screen that is looking for system32/drivers/ntfs.sys file when they try to boot up. The screen says the file is missing or corrupted. Before going over there to help them, I thought I would do some research on possible ways to help them. I am good at following directions and know how to follow DOS instructions, going into safe mode to do things, etc. I was thinking that if I were to copy this file from my machine and went to their house and either got into dos or safe mode, I could put the file in their driver folder and give it a try. What do you think? They don't have a restore disk. Should I try that or how can I attempt to restore their machine?

Thanks, Suz

 

[bradly]

Here's the steps:

1. Boot into the recovery console: http://techtalk.yourtechonline.com/forum_recovery_console.php

2. At the command prompt, type:

cd \windows\system32\drivers [enter]
ren ntfs.sys ntfs.old [enter]

3. Now you need to copy a fresh ntfs.sys file back into the system32\drivers folder.
Either pull it out of the Windows Disk (I386 folder), or perhaps the I386 folder is in the C:\Windows directory.

 

[sbatchelor]

Thanks, I will go try this.........and let you know if it works.....suz

Here's the steps:

1. Boot into the recovery console: http://techtalk.yourtechonline.com/forum_recovery_console.php

2. At the command prompt, type:

cd \windows\system32\drivers [enter]
ren ntfs.sys ntfs.old [enter]

3. Now you need to copy a fresh ntfs.sys file back into the system32\drivers folder.
Either pull it out of the Windows Disk (I386 folder), or perhaps the I386 folder is in the C:\Windows directory.

 

[sbatchelor]

I did what Brad told me and it worked, however, before it rebooted into Windows it wanted it to do a check disk and said over and over something to the effect that it can't read the drive...so we think it was a hard drive failure.