fixing corrupt files?

yesterday i was on the phone with canon tech for 4 hours trying to get the my photo printer CP720 driver to install. and was using a vista driver. but we couldn't get the computer to find or recognize the driver. we tried every thing he could think of. but the PC wouldn't recognize it. then he told me to do a

sfc scannow scan. and it went up to 99% then said it had some corrupt files. but could not fix. is there a way to find and fix these files with out losing all my other stuff i have on my PC? thanks for any help. on this.

 

I know you said you talked to thier tech dept. and you tried everything he said but you did not say what all you tried aside from the scan. Be that as it may excuse me if i am suggesting something you already tried. Just b/c Vista told you the files were corrupt does not make it so however that hardly mattersas i'm not sure if they can be "fixed" anyway but i could be wrong there are others here who are more knowledgeable than i about this sort of thing. Anyway this is what i would do and have done in the past with naughty drivers. Go to your device manager and completely and fully uninstall/remove ALL and ANY drivers associated with the device in question. After that reboot into safe mode and with the device hooked up, go back to your device manager right click on the device in question,select properties then the driver tab,update drivers, then browse my computer manually for driver software. If you know where the Vista drivers you downloaded are you should be able to direct it to them or if they are on disk to the drive they are in same deal. Also if it originally came with a driver disk for XP you could try those drivers by using the same method a lot of XP software works just fine under Vista.

*Example i am using a Lexmark 2400 series4in1 with XP drivers and everything works fine but i did have to manually direct Vista to them.

 

i was on the phone with canon and he said something might be wrong with the inf file. canon had me try about 10 different was to install it even in save mode. he even had me uninstall the driver like you said in device manager. then i called gateway tech. were i got the PC from. and the tech had me do all different kind of ways to install it. the test the gateway tech had me do. it did show some thing in the driver file is corrupt. and all i can do is to reinstall vista. so i'll just do that. because now my gaming mouse is messing up. thanks for all the help. i'll let ya know how things turn out after i do it

 

Hold on there! Have you tried using your Vista disk to repair your OS? Insert it reboot and choose repair my computer. I would do that before i go re-installing the entire OS!!

 

thats what im going to do. but the gateway tech said. i mite lose the stuff i have on there. so im backing up the stuff i want to save. today i just had to turn off the (UAC) so i can run my mouse. the driver stop working on that. i cant do any thing untill monday because i wont be here.

 

A couple of bits of useful info, the fact that some files are not repaired by sfc is not a problem, sfc will not repair 'configurable' system files since overwriting with the original would not be configured and could prevent the computer booting, also any files which do not directly affect the booting operation will not be repaired as these can be done inside a running OS (or tagged to do so after a restart), this is designed behaviour and is not a cause to suggest reinstalling Vista, in fact as there are so many debugging routines and repair tools in Vista there should be almost no reason ever to reinstall to correct a problem.

Your problem sounds like a corrupt or innapropriate driver file set which might be cured by downloading a fresh copy of the files, or a straight forward faulty device, the printer itself. \if either of these is the case then reinstalling Vista will achieve nothing.

Now you have run sfc also run disk check to verfiy there are no bad clusters on the disks surface, the most common cause of 'corrupt' files, do this by right clicking the drive's icon and go to 'properties', select the tools tab and select 'check now' make sure both options are ticked, you will get a message that it can't be done as the files are in use and asked if you want it to happen on the next boot, you do so agree and then reboot to get that job done.

Now try installing a new copy of the driver inside Vista running in normal mode, post what happens for further help if needed.