Win XP doesn't boot: BSOD...what happened?

[sgopal2]

I've had WinXP Pro for about 3 months now...no problems whatsoever. All of a sudden this morning I went to boot up my PC, and I get the following error (on a blue screen):

------------------------------
Stop: c000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE
or its log or alternate
It is corrupt, absent or not writable.

Beginning dump of physical memory
Dumping physical memory to disk: <then here it would count down...then reboot...then cycle again to the blue screen and start over>

----------------------------

This happened 3-4 times before I got fed up. I tried to boot to safe mode, same blue screen. I tried to boot to a command prompt, but I didn't have a clue what to do. I went to the above directory and found the SOFTWARE file, but it appeared to be ok from what I could tell....I even tried the "last good configuration option"...I still got cycled back to the above blue screen. There were no recent power surges...the ONLY thing recent I installed was the Comcast Cable email client application 2 days ago. WTF???

My system stats:
Athlon XP 1700 + / Epox 8KHA + / FSB 133 mHZ
Crucial 512 MB PC 2100 DDR
Plextor Plexwriter 12/10/32 CD-RW
IBM Deskstar 40 GB EIDE 7200 RPM (I ran an IBM disk fitness on this puppy a few weeks ago and it was fine)
Matrox G400 Dualhead AGP
Win XP Pro

I finally had to re-install windows XP from scratch .... ARGH, now all the files I had on C: are gone...WTF happened?? How do I prevent it from happening again??

 

[thedeliman]

that sucks...

what you probably could have done was pop in the windows XP cd and see if a "repair" option could've been selected. maybe it was just that file that was corrupted...

too bad i can't help you with the error message, but I CAN help with the annoying reboot every time a BSOD pops up (I think it's pretty *stupid*: if the problem is still there before you get a chance to fix it, how on earth will XP remove itself from this endless loop of blue screen, reboot, blue screen, reboot...?)

anyway...
1. just right click on my computer > Advanced
2. click on the settings button for Startup and Recovery
3. Under "system failure", uncheck the "automatically restart" option

good luck!

 

[NogginBoink]

sgopal,

Sounds like you were the victim of filesystem corruption. You can prevent this by making backups. (Sorry, but that's really the right answer.)

In this particular case, it probably would have been possible to use a backup copy of the registry to boot the machine. The backup copy could have been put in place from the recovery console.