Hi, well its been a long and eventful night/morning.
I couldnt get the computer to boot up from the ubcd so I moved on to option 2
I followed the directions and renamed the 5 files im system32\config folder
However, after that I was to switch to the system volume information folder. That was not accessible so I followed the additional instructions linked, which involved copying the five folders from windows\repair into the system32\config folder.
The first 4 worked but when I tried to copy the “system” folder it was not found. The computer will not reboot on exit because the system folder is missing.
I found some blogs online to others who encountered this problem. They were advised to see if there was a System.sav folder and use that as the system folder. I used either that or a system.bak that was in the repair folder and tried using it as my system folder in system32\config.
On restart the computer booted to an older desktop but it also showed some fatal errors and there was no mouse and keyboard again at that point so I ws stuck.
Went back in with the windows xp cd and undid my toying with teh “system” folder so I am back to being in the
middle of the instructions for restoring the registry if I lacked access to the system volume information folder, and in taht process I am told the “system” folder can’t be found to copy from the repair folder (which is true there is no folder “system” in repair.
So I’m missing a system folder and still am unable to restore the usb functionality. can’t boot up at all at this point can still boot from the cd.
Dumb question, shouldn’t the cd have a system folder on it that I can use at this point? Any help is appreciated, including should I hiree somebody to try and sort this out.
It seems the missing system folder is a new problem I created in the process, because the computer did boot up before, albeit w/o any usb ports.
OK... I’m a computer guy and I usually free-load on sites like this, but I feel like I can contribute this time.
I followed the advice about plugging the hard drive into a different computer. You know, this can be more or less difficult depending on the 2 computers’ configurations. There are a lot of tricks just to that procedure alone.
After plugging the hard drive in, YOU HAVE TO FIX THE PROBLEM THAT MADE THE FOUND NEW HARDWARE WIZARD COME UP!!!!!!
The found new hardware wizard should not come up when installing a standard mouse or keyboard. Usually this is caused by a cryptographic problem where the driver signing is all screwed up. Dial-a-fix can repair this problem on XP; if you’re on Vista I don’t know exactly what to tell you but this is a page from Microsoft discussing the general problem: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822798
Here’s dial-a-fix: http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Dial-a-fix-Download-27328.html
Once you run dial-a-fix and no longer get the Found New Hardware Wizard for every little piece of hardware (try connecting a different mouse or something), you should be able to put the drive back in the computer it came from, and boot it up.
You’re not done yet!! Now you need to clean up the device manager! To make the device manager really show you all the hidden devices, open a command prompt and type:
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
start devmgmt.msc
Then when the device manager opens, go to view > show hidden devices.
Remove anything with a yellow splat, or anything under USB that says Unknown Device.
GOOD LUCK JIM! If you found this page, you probably really needed the help!