I have an office meeting at Commander’s Palace today (rock), so I want to go ahead and share this incident with the world, for Googling purposes.
One of my workstations at the office (Windows 2000) wouldn’t really boot yesterday.
Whether in Safe Mode, Boot Logging (which it didnt. grr.), Last Known Good, etc., it would mostly load up, flash the quickest Blue Screen of Death ever, then reboot.
I popped out the drive, threw it into another system, scandisked, defragged, and scanned for virii/malware.
All clean. Still no boot.
So, while it was in the other system, I loaded up the System Hive ( %SystemRoot%\System32\Config\system ) in regedt32, and (pay attention now) modified the AutoReboot Value in [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl].
In that value, 0 = disabled and 1 = enabled.
So now I was able to boot up and transcribe the BSOD, which goes a little something like this:
STOP: C0000218 {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.
Weak. That part of the registry pulled a Pizza the Hut and ate itself to death.
So, I did have an old copy of SOFTWARE, but it was soo old that it was useless.
I backed up the user directories, and just formatted and started fresh.
Perhaps I should add registry crap to the daily backup routine.
Or maybe just once a week.
If/when I do, ill make sure to post it up here and share.