Question about repairing Windows XP Pro

[jyates]

Hi all,

A buddy brought me an IBM 600X laptop to look at for him and I'm
out of my league on this one.

He's running XP Pro and upon bootup it blue screens and says this.......

It does this either starting normally or in safe mode.

"Stop:C0000219 {Registry file failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
\systemroot\system32\config\SAM
or its log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent or not writable.
Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete

I was going to try to use the repair by booting from the XP cd but
I tell it to boot into windows and then I'm looking at the
c:\windows prompt and I typed "help" and it showed me the
different commands but I don't have a clue what to do next.

I'm trying to not have to wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything but it appears
that maybe some of the boot files are corrupted and I'm hoping my GOOD friends
here on AT might could give me a hand?

Thanks in advance for any and all help!

Jim

 

[JW310]

To do a repair install of WinXP, you don't want to go into the recovery console. Hit 'Enter' at the point where it asks if you want to install WinXP or go to the Recovery Console. The next prompt that comes up should see that WinXP is already installed on the system, and from there it'll give you the option of running a repair install of Windows.

 

[jyates]

Thanks,
I'll give that a try and report back!

 

[jyates]

Originally posted by: JW310
To do a repair install of WinXP, you don't want to go into the recovery console. Hit 'Enter' at the point where it asks if you want to install WinXP or go to the Recovery Console. The next prompt that comes up should see that WinXP is already installed on the system, and from there it'll give you the option of running a repair install of Windows.

Thanks for the tip....I tried it and it took a while but at the last moment
as it finished it said.....

"Setup cannot set the required Windows XP Configuration information. This indicates
an internal setup error. Contact your system administrator."

I heard the hard drive "thrashing" some like it was trying to write data to a bad spot and couldn't.
I'm guessing it may have a bad spot in the first part of the hard drive and that's why the boot up
files were corrupted and also why it won't repair either.

The drive is formatted NTFS....is there anyway I can run a "scandisk" on the hard drive to see
if indeed it has bad spots on it?

EDIT.....

I'm sure from the noises that the hard drive is making it's got bad spots in it.
I tried to repair it one more time and as it was looking for previous windows
installations it stopped and the hard drive "thrashed" making clicking noises
like it was searching for data but couldn't find any and it just hung there.
I'm going to start looking for a good used hard drive for this thinkpad.

Thanks again for your help!

Jim

 

[JW310]

Yup.... boot back into the recovery console that you were in before, and run the command "chkdisk /r" . That should run a scan of the hard drive, and let you know if it finds any errors on the drive. It'll probably take a while, though, depending on how big your hard drive is.

 

[jyates]

Originally posted by: JW310
Yup.... boot back into the recovery console that you were in before, and run the command "chkdisk /r" . That should run a scan of the hard drive, and let you know if it finds any errors on the drive. It'll probably take a while, though, depending on how big your hard drive is.

It's a 12gb and it hit several spots around 25% to 30% and slowed down and worked
through them and it hit 50% and is just clicking and having a good old time trying
to work though the bad spots

Looks like I'm in the market for a 12gb to 20gb hard drive.

 

[forkd]

I have had this problem before and just found your post because I had it again this morning. If you have another computer to boot the hard drive into as a slave you can fix this.

in the "bad" hard drive navigate to the Windows\system32\config folder and you will see two sam files. One is in small letters and is a backup, the other one is in LARGE CAPS and is the original.

You should be able to delete the LARGE CAPS file and then boot it into the original machine but I like to copy the small caps one to the desktop, change it to LARGE CAPS and then copy it into the original folder.

Sometimes this seems to remove user accounts other than the first one created and the Administrator so you should look under "Documents and Settings" to see the other users folders. You can now create a username spelled exactly the same, sometimes I have to create the account, delete it (keep files option) and then create it again.

Hope this helps

btw...if you don't have another hard drive to boot into I have done it using a linux boot disk(knoppix to be exact) and I am sure you can do it with a boot floppy if you don't mind using the DOS

 

[jyates]

Thanks for the help, but it ended up that the hard drive was bad and wouldn't allow
data to be written to it so I replaced the drive and everything is fine now!