Frank's Blog

These days a friend came to me asking for help with her laptop which didn’t want to start.
It was a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 bought in the States 14 months ago (more or less) and it showed up with this message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

A quick search in the internet recommended to use the Windows Console Tool that comes with the installation cd. Guess what, there was no cd.
So I started with my normal actions when “there is something wrong”. I plugged in my Billix USB-Stick and booted the Damn Small Linux (DSL)
I tried to mount the harddisc, but it failed. Maybe DSL is not able to get it, I thought and tried a Knoppix 6.0.1 cd. Strangely I wasn’t able to boot from the cd or from any other cd. Whoops, something wrong with the SATA controller or missing drivers in my boot images ?
The Thinkpad has a hidden partition with some diagnostic tools, I tried to boot it up but it got stuck and was unusable.

Thanks to the architecture of the Thinkpad it was quite easy to unmount the harddisc and connected it via an external harddisc cage and USB to my iMac with OSX 10.6.2. I wanted to save at least the user data before going deeper.
While copying the data errors showed up and the procces failed:

ata attribute of mft_no 0×7d58 contains invalid data (wrong signature, wrong version, or wrong size), ignoring and using defaults.
NTFS-fs warning (device /dev/disk1s1, pid 827): ntfs_inode_afpinfo_cache(): AFP_AfpInfo data attribute of mft_no 0×7d67 contains invalid data (wrong signature, wrong version, or wrong size), ignoring and using defaults.
…
FireWire (OHCI) Lucent ID 5901 built-in: 62 bus resets in last 3 minutes.
NTFS-fs error (device /dev/disk1s1, pid 163): ntfs_vnop_blockmap(): Called for inode 0×67ae, byte offset 0×1aa80. This is not a multiple of the physical block size 512 thus the mapping cannot be performed. Returning error: EINVAL.
NTFS-fs error (device /dev/disk1s1, pid 163): ntfs_read(): Failed for file inode 0×67ae, start offset 0×0, start count 0×42400, now offset 0×42400, now count 0×0, ioflags 0×800 (cluster_read_ext(), error 22).

My next try was with a Linux virtual machine but it showed also filesystem errors and recommended chkdsk and use of windows. Okay, wasn’t there a Windows 7 installation in a Parallels virtual machine somewhere ?
Yes, there was. I started it and connected two harddiscs, the problematic one and another for having space to transfer the user data to. Well, it worked good enough to grab all data (allthough not good enough to copy the users homefolders entirely).

Afterwards I let Windows 7 fix the harddisc (on connect via USB, Windows 7 noticed the bad disc and asked if it should fix or just mount). Then I mounted the fixed harddisc in the laptop and started it.
The corrupt file error of \WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM showed up again.

I tried to start the build in diagnostics tools, and this time it started up normally.
I started the hard disc check which failed on the 3 SMART test: Short Self Test, Extended Self Test and Conveyance Self Test.
The Surface Scan Test got stuck at 35%, I cancelled it.

So, definitely something more broken than just a filesystem or a windows system file.
I gave it a last try with a BartPE system booting from USB, but it got stuck on accessing the harddisc.

Hopefully there is warranty on the device, the documents are still there and the case will be accepted by Lenovo.
Let’s see….