Fatal post-power outage problems

I'm having some huge problems after a power outage, which seemed to have corrupt my registry and some sort of hardware. If I try to boot up on my C drive, WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SYSTEM is missing or damaged, when I try to boot to recovery console or safe mode or anything on that drive, I get BAD_POOL_CALLER. I'm writing this from a partition on my E drive, where all my files I need are safe. Now is basically a hardware problem. Whenever I scroll down anything, there is a horrible chopping effect, same with moving any windows. I checked the task manager and my processor is taking a huge load from these simple things, I cant figure out why. There are some other problems that are preventing me from just using this Windows. Is there anyone out there who can help me?

Cheers,
-Luke

 

The entire process for fixing this can be found here in the MS Knowledge base.

 

I tried that, but when I try to load the recovery console for the C drive, I get bad pool caller error. This is the only time I get this error. When I load the recovery console for the E drive windows, all of those files on the C drive are access denied.

 

i would buy a new drive, format and load win on it and set you old drive to slave and get data off it before drive decides to die on you.

 

I sort of already did that, loaded windows onto my storage drive. I've got my files, that's no problem. Windows is just being a pain this time around, not installing Windows Updates and theres probably a bunch of other stuff not right with it, more than normal. I would just wipe and start again with my old setup, but there has to be some underlying hardware problem. I need help in diagnosing that, its very choppy with scrolling and moving windows around and movies, processor driven stuff I believe. Processor is always at 100% when I perform these actions.

 

If you use the CD to boot then the hard disk (and Windows installation) is not used and therefore the error should not be found. You may get the problem if you install the recovery console and thus bypass the CD. The advice above (re saving the data) is an excellent suggestion and should be given due consideration.

 

When I first tried the recovery console through the XP setup CD, thats when I first got the bad pool caller. Initially the problem was "WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SYSTEM missing or corrupted", no way to start up, so I turned to the recovery CD. I just installed it (to my E drive partition of Windows) because I was sick of waiting for the setup CD to load each time. Thankfully the scrolling problem I had was fixed when I reinstalled my video card drivers. There isn't really a problem of saving data on the C drive, that drive is mostly programs/games that I can install/download again. The power outage seems kind of like a firecracker that went off in my C drive, half the files in there are corrupted/just won't open. Bollocks.

 

If there's nothing on the C drive that you want then boot from the CD, delete the C partition and then have setup re-create it. Let setup do a format and then continue to reinstall a fresh copy of Windows.

BTW - installing the recovery console has a good and bad side. The good side is that it's convenient but the bad is that it won't work properly if you have a problematic hard drive. Best to put up with the wait and load it directly from the CD.