Hi, an Windows XP PC I used crashed after I took a HD out of the computer and now starts up with the error message that system32\drivers\pci.sys is damaged or deleted, and when I try to boot from the OS CD I get an error that setupdd.sys couldnt be loaded and an errorcode 4.
I am at a loss what can be done about that?
P.S. Trying to boot from a WIN2000 cd did freeze almost imediatelly.
Have you tried booting from a floppy? I think the Windows CD still tries to look for stuff on the hard drive when booting.
Personally, I would reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything. (I’m posting unnecessary extra details here as I won’t be posting for the next week.) Start by going into your BIOS and setting the boot sequence to boot to floppy first. If you don’t have a boot disk lying around, use someone else’s computer to make one. Make sure it has the utilities fdisk and format on it. Boot with floppy in drive. Use fdisk to wipe everything out and make a new partition. Format it. Install Windows XP on it. Wish you had backed things up. Cry. 
Wont cry, its a backup computer now after I hooked up my nice new athlon, thought that I had to go through the old bootdisk routine with it, thanks for the reply.
Don’t give up to fast. You may have to change the BIOS to point to the CD Drive as the first boot device. If the computer will not boot from a CD then try a floppy boot and see if you can get to the CD drive to use the Recovery Console to repair the installation. Info at this link about the Recovery Console and the pci.sys error you are recieving.
When you change components the bios doesn’t know that you changed them, thus it thinks the old stuff is there. Be sure to look in your bios to see what is listed. Or change the bios to a safe boot setting. You can’t put a new OS on if the bios his boot sector protection enabled cause it can’t write a new boot sector…
not to hijack, but this brings up something I’m confused about:
the DOS based systems, like WIN98, can be (sort of) read by booting from a DOS diskette. A DOS diskette can be made several ways, including using the sys command. The (sort of) occurs because I’m unsure of what disk size DOS will not understand.
But DOS cannot read NTFS at all. Is there a boot diskette that will read NTFS, so maybe a very desired file can be obtained?
XP has boot disks. But its a set of disks.
I have something like that (well, actually it’s on a CD), but it’s somebody’s homebrew effort, and probably isn’t too legal.
There are a few programs that allow you to read NTFS under DOS. Just go to Yahoo and search for NTFS DOS. Most of the programs are shareware. If you don’t register them, they will allow you to read from the NTFS volume, but not write to it. Still, this will be enough if you just want to locate or copy a file.
Oh, just to clarify: You’d have to find a Windows 9x boot disk or a copy of DOS. Boot from that, then load NTFSDOS.