Member Avatar for ingeborgdot@yah

A friend of mine had a computer go down and needed the info off the hard drive so he tried installing it as a slave in another computer. That would not take so he installed it as the master and the other one as the slave and it worked. He got all the info off that he needed but now when he went to put his back in as a master it says something like can't load explorer.exe. You must reinstall windows. Why would this happen?

Did he directly copy over everything including the Windows directory? If so, he would have messed up his install. He'll have to do a repair install of the operating system to fix it.

For future reference, his computer most likely didn't load when he added the other drive because he didn't set the master/slave jumper settings on the drives correctly.

Member Avatar for ingeborgdot@yah

No, all he copied was address book, pictures and I think some emails and documents.

check the system.ini file (C:\Windows\system.ini). Scroll till you find a line that starts with 'Shell='. Make sure it reads as 'Shell=explorer.exe'. Save the file and reboot. You'll need to do this from a DOS window (obviously). Once you get to a DOS Prompt, type the following commands.

C: <enter>
cd \ <enter>
cd windows <enter>
cd command <enter>
edit C:\Windows\System.ini <enter>

Change the line to read as shell=explorer.exe
Save the file and restart the computer. If this doesn't help, post back here.

it is long time i seen this problem with many users.
Most likley user profile is corrupt. After through task manager running explorer.exe,if u can create user or login as adminstartor and and copy from admin desktop to user desktop.
logout and login with administrator again and restart computer and login as user this time. it will work.
thanks,
Raydar

Plz stop rushing here n there,, the problem can be easily solve with this simple step
Get a virus free Flash drive ,,open my Computer on another Pc of the same versions of window....open the local disk c:,then open windows folder look for explorer.exe copy it to flash...then go to the problem Computer..just open the flash drive there thru taskmanager by pressing ctrl+shift+Esc or Alt+ctrl+del goto new task from browse u can access the flash drive ..then u now copy the explorer back to the windows directory.....u can as well launch it there....good luck.

or
if u can open the task manager...just open the new task dialogue or the run dialogue box
Place your Windows Installation CD in the CD Drive and type this in the "Run" Windows: "sfc /scannow" without quotes. thast will fix all the damaged files in your system without lossing any data.

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