Re: XP Won't Boot
From: Brian S. Craigie (bcraigie_at_bigfoot.com)
Date: 12/29/04
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Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 01:16:43 +0000
If the hdd has a bad sector, chances are it will happen again.
Recommend urgently (before much changes on the drive) taking out the hdd
and putting it in a PC (you can get a 3.5" to 2.5" adaptor for a very
small outlay) then use partition magic to copy the hard disk over to a
partition on another [spare] drive. Then purchase a new drive and copy
it back onto the new drive. Only then should you try to repair the O/S.
I know bad sectors should be marked out, but I think once you see one,
that's the start of the decline of the drive.
If you repair PCs/Laptops for a living, that's a handy adaptor/setup to
have. If you don't, it might be cheaper to get a repair shop to do it
[copy the hard disk to a new one] for you.
You can avail yourself of a BartPE (see http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) CD
to enable you to get a command line to copy and move files etc. You may
then be able to copy the software file backup from
c:\windows\repair\software to c:\windows\system32\config\software (back
it up first though somewhere). Might get you going. You may need to
also do the other registry files. See:
http://www.digitalwebcast.com/2002/03_mar/tutorials/cw_boot_toot2.htm
(for recovery console in the above document, you can substitute BartPE
CD command line)
Depending on how old the files in the repair folder are, and whether
system recovery was turned on you may need to reinstall some software,
and put SP2 on to tidy things up, but you may not have much choice if
the software part of the registry is irretrievable/corrupt anyway.
HTH.
Brian
On 27/12/2004 20:27, stockdam wrote:
> A relative gave me a newish laptop which won't boot. It has been
> working ok for several months.
>
> It's running XP but I don't know which version.
>
> When booting it gives the following error.....
>
>
> STOP C0000218 Registry File Failure....The registry cannot load the
> hive \systemroot\system32\config\software
>
>
> It won't boot to safe mode.
>
> I'm guessing that it's a registry problem.
>
> To be sure I ran a memory test and everything was ok.
>
> I used EBCD and did a disk test - it showed a bad sector under
> windows/system32/config/software ... I didn't let EBCD repair it. All
> other sectors were ok.
>
> I tried using my XP CD to repair windows but when it asks for the
> administrator password I couldn't proceed as I didn't know the
> password. I used the password reset tool in EBCD and reset the admin
> password to blank but that didn't solve it - recover still said I was
> using the wrong password (I'm using an XP Pro CD and his laptop uses
> Home but I don't think this matters).
>
> I went to a microsoft site http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308402
>
> and it tells you what to do if the admin password is refused even if
> it's blank. Basically it provides 6 floppy boot discs - why floppy
> discs and no CDrom? Well the laptop doesn't have a floppy drive so this
> avenue won't work. Should I try to create a boot CD with these?
>
> I went back to my windows CD and went to reinstall windows - it says a
> previous version is already installed. It wouldn't provide the option
> to repair it though.
>
> I also used the NTFS file manager in EBCD but it wouldn't show the
> harddrive - does this mean the hardrive is faulty or the NTFS file
> system is faulty?
>
> Can I recover this situation without reformatting the harddrive? I
> can't get into a command prompt to copy or rename any files.
>
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