Post #143,271
2/25/04 3:30:57 PM
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Windows 2000 Pro Bluescreen on boot
Message:
---------------------------------------
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STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
\\SystemRoot\\System32\\Config\\SOFTWARE
or its log or alternative.
It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.
---------------------------------------
---------------------------------------
So, I guess this is a bad thing?
My tech guys did a disk test, came up with
IDE errors. Kiss it goodbye.
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Post #143,273
2/25/04 3:35:15 PM
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to recover data
get a copy of another file from an adjecent similar OS machine and feed them one at a time to see if it will come up. Have done this with "some" sucess in past. If you have good backups hahahahahaha! then ashcan it.
thanx,
bill
when I was young I envisioned myself as the embodiment of Trinity, Now I realize I have turned into the Bambino
questions, help? [link|mailto:pappas@catholic.org|email pappas at catholic.org]
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Post #143,275
2/25/04 3:38:55 PM
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Toss it
I do all my work (files, etc) on my back-end Unix server via Samba.
So it'll be a fresh install of Win2K, Office 2003, and a few odds and ends.
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Post #144,168
3/2/04 5:33:12 PM
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Are you sure?
Do you store your bookmarks, and other things on the Samba server as well? If so then ashcan it. If not, see if you can recover them off the hard drive in some way before ashcanning it. I've reformatted because I thought I had all my files on another computer or backed up, and then regretted it later as I forgot a few important files on the messed up partition. :)
"Lady I only speak two languages, English and Bad English!" - Corbin Dallas "The Fifth Element"
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Post #143,274
2/25/04 3:38:21 PM
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Pull the drive
Slave it to another drive in another computer, rip the data.
"I'll stop calling this crew 'Orwellian' when they stop using 1984 as an operations manual." - J. Bradford DeLong
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Post #143,292
2/25/04 4:59:24 PM
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Oh man that is hosed
SOFTWARE is everything installed, including Windows itself.
You can do a "last known good" - dance on F8 while it's trying to boot.
-drl
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Post #143,311
2/25/04 5:49:12 PM
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ICLRPD
You can do a "last known good" - dance on F8 while it's trying to boot. ===
Implicitly condoning stupidity since 2001.
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Post #143,407
2/26/04 3:23:57 AM
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Nah
"Last Known Good" is nothing to do with the registry, or the drivers. It's simply the last time you managed to log in. The best you can do with that is to recover your own user registry hive, which won't help here.
Peter
[link|http://www.debian.org|Shill For Hire]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home Page - Now with added Zing!]
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Post #143,414
2/26/04 4:48:46 AM
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Nah
I thought - well I know - a successful shutdown will by default make a backup copy of the registry (that's what all the disk activity is), which can be reloaded with a "last known good". Usually the backup has the same issues as the primary, because by the time you know a real problem is afoot it has propagated to all 4 backup copies. The only real use is for an install of something that completely prevents booting.
I remember well when this facility was added to Windows NT - the first release (3.1) did not have such a facility, so if you installed a driver that would not work (very easy to do in the early days - wow this was 10 years ago now), you were dead, the whole thing had to be reinstalled. 3.5 allowed the "Last Known Good" choice to roll back to the previous configuration.
The backups are somewhere below system32 and are compressed.
-drl
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Post #143,425
2/26/04 8:08:11 AM
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My bad
Anyway, I never bother "fixing" Windows boxes.
There's no point (it'll only break again anyway) and it's far more cost-effective to reload the operating system.
Peter
[link|http://www.debian.org|Shill For Hire]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home Page - Now with added Zing!]
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Post #143,319
2/25/04 6:08:08 PM
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I got that yesterday...
on my production machine; the thing I do my release builds on.
I tried the obvious things, then pulled the drive and mounted it on a machine in the lab as a second SCSI drive. My data partition was untouched. The C drive was missing the entire "Documents and Settings" directory; ie. no registry any more. Truely FUBAR. I saved my data without incident and the miserable box of bits is probably still re-imaging itself now (we use a LAN based installation system to load a standard image.)
It seems sort of a coincidence. The IT shitweasles have been pushing every patch and anti-virus they can collect onto my machine and no virus has been detected. All our machines have been slowing down though. I can't really say who wrecked my machine. Could have been all the crap pushed by IT; could have been a virus that is undetected; could have been bitrot, as I haven't reloaded the machine for about 15 months. It's probably something worth keeping track of.
Hope you didn't lose anything valuable. Good luck.
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Post #143,323
2/25/04 6:12:17 PM
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That is weird
I've seen every conceivable manner of Windows death, and I've never even heard of this one before. I think something may be up. I seem to remember a day in February, late, being trotted out a couple of months ago..
-drl
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Post #143,331
2/25/04 6:23:48 PM
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Sure is.
I wonder if it might be the payload of some innocuous worm that has been lieing dormant for some time waiting for some trigger. I have nothing to support this thought but paranoia and the coincidence. It's the first time I've seen this as well.
Oh ick... interesting times....
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Post #143,336
2/25/04 6:32:01 PM
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Re: Sure is.
The really weird thing is - it's the SOFTWARE key in particular. This is the most important key in the registry. Of course if your copy of user.dat stored in local settings is missing, that shouldn't directly affect the SOFTWARE key - that's in system.dat and it's under WINDOWS\\SYSTEM32.
-drl
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Post #143,434
2/26/04 9:33:12 AM
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Yeah, brain fart
The most noticeable thing was that the directory had gone away. On inspection WINNT\\system32\\config\\system and WINNT\\system32\\config\\system.alt had also both gone away as well.
I find the whole thing strange in any event.
Still, toast is toast... the machine is still rebuilding over the network and I'm using a laptop which is murder on my carpal tunnel, so I'm *REALLY* in a mood today.
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Post #143,385
2/25/04 10:16:10 PM
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True hardware error in my case
IDE drive hosed in certain area, which I assume it where that file was.
I had spent the morning juggling a KVM with my systems. I wanted to be able to see my Windows Desktop on my nice 21" monitor. And I wanted to use my good IBM keyboard that was on my Linux box. So I stole an old Apex Outlook KVM from our graveyard and started plugging stuff in. But then I found an old IBM keyboard that needed some serious cleaning. So I popped the caps, put them in a bucket to soak, and blew the keyboard. But while I was re-arranging I realized that my trackballs were serial but the KVM is PS/2. So I started scrounging for a couple of converters, of which I found 1. But then I realized even when my 21" screen was on Linux I wanted to see my Windows desktop on a 19" screen so I could monitor my email, so I then plugged in a VGA splitter to send the signal to both the 21" and the 19", and I used the switch on the front of the 21" to bounce between my Linux session and my Windows session. And then I realized that I also wanted 2 keyboard active at the same time since when I facing the 19" I wanted the keyboard live even though it was not my primary keyboard. So I added a dual keyboard/single system plug. And then I realized I needed to do the samething with the 2nd trackball, but I couln't find another Serial->PS/2. Since I had found the 2nd good IBM keyboard the KVM didn't look so important anymore, especially since in practice I didn't like bouncing between Windows and Linux on my 21" monitor. So I start to put it back the old way, leaving the good newly washed IBM keyboard in place.
Did you ever read: "If you give a mouse a cookie?"
And then I got the boot error. IT delivered a new box before I left tonight, I just need to install a couple of apps and I'll be fine.
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Post #144,166
3/2/04 5:31:28 PM
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Hard drive errors
Only thing you can do is try to recover data from the hard drive in some way. If it is a NTFS system you are going to need to slave it to another system or use a second hard drive with W2k or XP on it to read the bad drive.
Or you could make a Bart PE CDR boot disk with XP SP1 or Win 2003:
[link|http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/|http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/]
Then boot off of it and see if you can access the hard drive and pull off the data files. It can take Nero 5.X to burn to a CDR if you have a registered copy of Nero and a CDR drive.
IDE errors are never good, signs of a failing hard drive. Get whatever you can off of the drive and then replace it. With errors it may never run Windows again or any other OS for that matter. If the hard drive rattles, it is even worse.
"Lady I only speak two languages, English and Bad English!" - Corbin Dallas "The Fifth Element"
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