Hoser

I was putting a computer in a new case and decided to add a ATA66 PCI card while I had everything apart. After ignoring the message about the driver not being certified by Microsoft (WinXP), I rebooted the system. I got an error message about \Windows\system32\drivers\pci.sys being corrupted. I couldn't get the machine to boot after that.

I tried to boot off the CD and do a repair, but I kept on getting a message about setupdd.sys couldn't be loaded. I found out that if you've updated WinXP, this file does version checks between the files on the CD and on the hard drive. If the hard drive has newer versions of the files, you can't repair it! I even tried the boot floppies, but I got the same error. I could find all sorts of information about getting around this in WinNT, but not in WinXP.

The final solution was so easy, I don't know why it took me so long to figure it out. I took the hard drive with the corrupted file and put it in my other WinXP computer. I then copied the pci.sys file to it and replaced the hard drive in the other machine. I turned on the computer, and everything worked! That's one good reason to have multiple computers in case anything goes wrong.