Head Meets Wall (Updated)

The other day, Deb’s computer started the day by refusing to boot, with a message about \windows\system32\config\system, which means registry corruption.

So great, boot from the XP CD, go into recovery console, and do the steps to fix the registry.

Except we have no clue what the administrator password is!  It’s none of about a dozen most likely candidates.  It actually appears that it doesn’t know, either, and whatever “remembers” that password on the hard drive doesn’t.

After the first pair of three password attempts - you are forced to reboot after three fails - the machine threw a twist at us, blue screening the boot into the XP CD.  That led me to test the memory and the hard drive with utilities on a special boot CD.  Of course they were fine.

Ultimately I ended up hooking Deb’s drive to another XP machine I’d just gotten working.  I backed up her important files in case we have to wipe and reinstall completely.  Then I realized that, duh, I could use the method for recovering the registry at the recovery console via being able to access the drive as secondary on a different machine.

So I did that, copying the original versions of the five hive files after backing up the bad files.  That should be enough to get you into Windows, from which you can manually replace the registry files with recent system restore point versions, so you’re not as bad off.

I realized I could cut to the chase and just put in the relevant system restore copy, but I was unable to access or set permissions to allow me to access the system information folder.  So I put the drive back in her machine.  When prompted, I allowed it to boot into safe mode.  Big mistake.  It wanted the administrator password!

Again, nothing worked, and after a few tries the system hung.  When turned back on, it gave the same error and again needed to be recovered.  This time, it allowed me to access the restore point files, so I swapped in the registry hives from the 10th, days before the failure.

No dice.  It still gives the error.  This is getting ridiculous.

I’m trying it at least one more time before I give up, but jeez…

Update:

No dice on a different restored registry, but it gets even better.

I realized I didn’t backup the wpa.dbl, so I hooked it to the other machine one more time to grab that.  Having it can make Windows product activation less painful on a reinstall.

Then I put it back, booted from the XP CD, had it delete the partition, format and install to it.  It chugged along and got through copying the files and ultimately gave a screen saying it couldn’t install yada yada (should have written it down to research; got distracted) and to contact your system administrator.  Doh!

Rebooting afterward, before I switched boot CDs, it attempted to boot from the hard drive and gave the exact same error as all along, implying a corrupt registry.  WTF, over?  On a fresh partition?

So now I am using something called Boot and Nuke to wipe the drive.  It’s one of the tools you can use for the purpose that meet DoD, NSA, etc. standards for protecting prior data from recovery.  Then I’ll try again.  Then I’ll probably try with a different CD drive reading the XP CD.  Then I’ll just have to try a different hard drive.

There’s no clear indication of hardware trouble, beyond it having made me suspicious at times of the hard drive and CD drive, maybe the IDE controller.  However, things can fry in subtle ways.  I’ve seen some pretty absurd stuff.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens.  Stay tuned…

1. Sounds like the same kind of weirdness that my computer did a few weeks back.
   It was all very strange. The weird thing is that both mine and Jackie’s computer acted up on the same day.  I have to wonder if its some sort of virus.

   Posted by Wayne  on  05/16  at  12:07 AM  from  Ohio
Page 1 of 1 pages

<< Back to main