“Biosinfo.inf is missing or corrupt”

[swee'pea99]

 I tried upgrading XP To Service Pack 3 on my laptop and everything went tits up. As per the subject line. Won't start up (not even to safe mode); can't even get a c: prompt in order to copy a good version of biosinfo into the right dir. I googled a bit and this seems to be a known issue. Do the instructions here make sense? Which is to say, does this look like a good solution? Or does anyone know of a better one? Any help appreciated. The onyl option is to use the repair CD to restore it to factory settings, but I think that would mean losing a lot of data, so I'm not keen unless there's really no alternative. 

 

[2Loose]

[quote name='swee'pea99' timestamp='1282297898' post='1369263']
I tried upgrading XP To Service Pack 3 on my laptop and everything went tits up. As per the subject line. Won't start up (not even to safe mode); can't even get a c: prompt in order to copy a good version of biosinfo into the right dir. I googled a bit and this seems to be a known issue. Do the instructions here make sense? Which is to say, does this look like a good solution? Or does anyone know of a better one? Any help appreciated. The onyl option is to use the repair CD to restore it to factory settings, but I think that would mean losing a lot of data, so I'm not keen unless there's really no alternative.
[/quote]

Looks spot on, if you have a floppy to hand (phnarr). No data lost this way.

Alternatively, if you don't have a floppy drive & disk, email the file to a web based email account then boot the machine from a Linux Live CD\DVD and retreive the file from email, save it to the hard disk. Most Live disks (Ubuntu etc.) now support writing to NTFS safely.

Both methods will take roughly the same amount of time though...

 

[swee'pea99]

Thanks. I've saved it to a CD, so I'll try that and see how it goes. It's all a bit of a bummer really - knew I shouldn't've bothered with SP3...

 

[2Loose]

As long as you have some kind of boot disk, or have made that CD bootable, then you will have no problems.