I rarely write about Windows errors on my blog, but I ran across a weird error on my Windows Laptop the other day that was quite annoying, and a little difficult to fix. Very quickly after the POST, I got an error that said:
 “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: C:\WINDOWS\system32\c_1252.nls”
It recommended trying to reinstall Windows using the recovery method. I didn’t have any XP CD’s around, so that wasn’t really an option for me.
I had a Knoppix disc around, so I started that up, and was able to see the partition fine and even mount it. All of my semi-important files were safe, but I copied them onto another machine just to be sure. When I tried to do a directory listing inside of the windows\system32 directory, I got an I/O error that definitely looked nasty.
After a bit of googling, I came across this page, that has an ISO you can download and boot into a Windows XP Recovery Console. Once, I was finally at the recovery console, I ran ‘chkdsk /r’ and it appeared to fix a couple problems. I reran it with ‘chkdsk /r /f’ to be sure that everything was fixed.
After a quick reboot, it stared up Windows without any further issues.