Re: Registry Failure - c0000218

Whoa! Hold the presses! This is now a completely different ball of wax! If the files on the mirror are not damaged you might be able to boot off the mirror with a fault tolerant boot floppy. Try that first, start reading here and follow the links in the articles for repair options: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=323432&SD=tech

When you see information about NT4 & RAID much of it also applies to Windows XP, the differences may only be minor.

If you must go to the Recovery Console and do the registry fix (KB307545) you need the RAID drivers on a floppy diskette and right when the Windows XP setup program starts you have to press F6 to load the "Mass Storage Device" drivers. As per instructions in other articles concerning mirror recovery you also need these drivers for the fault tolerant boot floppy.

John

IanG wrote:

Hi John,
Boy am I having fun ( I don't think !).
Let me try and clarify where I am and what has happened recently, as follows:

The pc is a shuttle, small footprint machine. I built it myself a couple of years ago from a "barebones" kit (ie I just assembled it really). It has 2 x 80 gb SATA hard drives which I mirrored via the onboard RAID software (RAID 1). There is no floppy disk drive, but there are usb connections and I have a couple of memory sticks ( 1gb and 512Mb).
The machine is running WinXP with SP2 installed. Internet connection is via broadband and I have autoupdate setup to run around 9:00 pm each night, although I do switch the machine off every night, sometimes too early sometimes not.

Okay, now since we last spoke I have managed to gain access to KB307545 and have read through it and it seems straightforward. I also have copies of KB309531 and KB822705 and I have printouts of all three.
I do not have any experience of the system recovery facility but I am about learn no doubt ;o)

I have just booted the machine up from the cdrom and, after a short period of loading files, got to the "Welcome to setup" menu.
I selected R for recovery and immediately got the following setup message:

"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer"
This was followed by some general advice about checking disks are powered up and then the final comment
"Setup cannot continue, to quit setup press F3".
Pressing F3 rebooted the machine.

I tried the process again and observed that the file loading was mainly drivers and did mention RAID controller among the files). However I then got the same error message from setup - that it could not find any hard drives !

If you can offer any advice at all, short of re-installing windows and starting all over again, then my weekend might just get a little brighter.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

.

Relevant Pages

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