Ho boy...I'm back (posting from my old Samsung Netbook) and I think I screwed the pooch on this one.
So, I carefully open the case in order to see if I can find a sound card name to relate to you fine gents and what do I find but a tower so full of dust and crud you could have assembled your own Persian cat. No good I thought plus I couldn't read much through all the dust. So I got out my trusty can of compressed air and spent some time blowing much of it away, then go then got the brilliant idea that a brush nozzle on the end of the central vac hose
would really suck the crud out. I assumed it would be suitably grounded considering its integration with the rest of the house.
I cleaned everything out nicely, got all the heat sink fins in various locations clear, made sure the fans all rotated properly then went looking around. I discerned that the sound card is probably on board the main board as there was no PCI card on the inside of the box where the sound outputs were. They just connect directly to the board through a small silver box. There is a dedicated video card (ATI Saphire HD 2600 Pro). The only text on the main board besides Intel is the number D975XBX.
I buttoned everything up, attempted to start it and got nothing showing on the screen after the usual Press F4 to enter RAIC utility.
Finally, the message appeared that Windows could not start normally and gave other options (Safe Mode etc.) I tried all those with no luck. The machine would always come back to "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: System32\Drivers\Ntfs.sys"
Yikes.
Seems like I might have damaged the hard drive with the vacuuming? It does seem strange that the error would be file related and not an issue with hardware...unless that's how it manifests itself.
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So - here's my plan but I will need to beg a little more of your patience: I have managed to get into the Repair Console by using the OEM CD. If that one file is bad surely I can use the copy command to overwrite from the CD? I just need to know what the command prompt syntax is to grab the file off the CD and write a copy into the correct system folder on the hard drive. The only other thing I need is to figure out what the CD drive letter is.
Can you guys help me with that syntax structure? I can't figure it out. And do you think this is a reasonable way forward? I assume if I've wrecked more than a single system file I'm going to find out pretty quick this isn't the fix...