WinXP: REGISTRY_ERROR (Even Safe Mode won't boot).

Factual Questions
1

My girlfriend’s counting on all you tech Dopers here. She’s got an aging 1GHz Athlon machine (tech specs at bottom of post) with a pair of hard drives in it. The first drive was installed new, and is a Maxtor 20GB IDE drive that her computer occasionally ID’s as SCSI (I’m not sure if the BIOS is passing bad info to XP, or if XP is misinterpreting the data passed from the BIOS auto-detect). The other drive is a Satanic (Western Digital?) 40GB that has been a constant source of heartache, and actually lived in one of my old computers until I built a new one from the ground up. I formatted it, wiped it squeaky clean, and installed it in her machine. She used it (with the odd complaint) for storing anime clips and so forth.

Usually, having the D: drive means her machine acts slower. WinXP is very aggressive about using the biggest drive for the swap file, and when large files are written to D: , it arbitrarily runs VER-R-R-R-RY slowly for hours, then disappears from the ‘recognized hardware’ in her machine (it’s as if WinXP gets a “ping timeout” on the drive!) and any pending file transfers hang. For this reason, we only plug it in when we need files that are on it.

Yesterday, we had the D: drive plugged in, and it wigged out. I did the normal shutdown procedure when the computer inevitably hung.

Last night, when she booted the machine, we got WinXP’s BSOD. The text of the message was not terribly reassuring: REGISTRY_ERROR and a bunch of hex-codes that return no hits on Google.

It recommends that I reboot and disconnect any “new hardware” – but with or without the D: drive, it still BSODs on me. So, my questions are:

  1. Have any of you had to deal with this before?
  2. Is there a way to fix it without losing the data on C: ?
  3. Why do I keep using a drive that is known to cause problems?

Jurphette’s Machine:
Gigahertz GA-7ZM motherboard (KT-133 chipset)
128M RAM (never caused problems)
2 IDE drives described above
NVidia GeForce II (never caused problems)
Soundblaster LIVE! PCI card
PCI Ethernet card
Toshiba DVD player/CD-RW drive (never caused problems)

2

I have encountered this problem too a few times in the past on my laptop running Windows XP. I have my harddisk split up into 2 partitions, so most of the time i just ended up installing XP on the other partition and booting like that.

The first possibility is that you can try to hook up the D: drive again and install Win XP on it and run it from there.

Another possibility is (if you don’t have too much data in your “Documents and Settings” folder) to just install Win XP again. You don’t need to format the hard drive or anything, you keep all the data, except that the install might empty your “Documents and Settings” folder.

The third possibility is to use the repair option in the Win XP installer. Boot from the Win XP CD then there should be an option: Press r - Reapir install , or something like that. Doing that you should get to the command prompt. Use “chkdsk C: /F /R” to check the drive and repair lost data. then try booting again. There is also a utility which repairs the registry, I’ll have to look it up. But maybe running chkdsk is enough.

The last possibility depends on whether you have formatted your hard drive with FAT32 or NTFS. Make a dos bootdisk and boot with it. When you are at the command prompt, try to access the harddisk C:. If that fails , you have NTFS. Then you need to download NTFSforDOS. With this programm you can access NTFS formatted drives from a boot disk.
If you succeed then you can continue directly. Otherwise follow the instructions coming with NTFSforDOS until you are at the dos prompt a:
Now you do the same as under possibility 3 : run “chkdsk /F /R” and the registry repair program.

P.S: Check the jumper settings on your hard drives whether they are correctly set to master-slave or not

3

Thanks, missing_link. FYI, the WinXP install CD won’t run in either (I)nstall or ®epair modes. Both routines abort with a nearly identical blue screen, which is a close cousin to the blue screen I get trying to boot normally. I’m pretty sure she’s got NTFS, so a regular DOS boot disk is no help.

I’ve never had to repair the registry from the command line before; any advice? I’ll go look for NTFSforDOS, if the rest of you Dopers will help me get this machine up and running. My girl has her heart set on playing Diablo II when she gets back from work tonight, and she’s got several characters on the C: drive, so reformatting is basically out of the question.

4

Hm, if it aborts during the install and repair routines, then it seems like a hardware problem to me.
Did you plug the D: drive back in before you tried to boot from the Win XP CD?

5

GNARF IT.

Just about shutting all options down aintcha ?
Damn shame about the installs.
Stick the blessed thing back in your box and try to copy everthing she needs off.
Has she been making her system regsitry snapshots ? (System Restore)
We can try a reinstall and merge to get back up and running.

You migh try a parallell install onto a known good drive and copy stuff off that way ? ?

6

Can your access the BIOS to set the CD as the first boot device. Then turn on the machine and try running the repair console. Here is a nice link with a bunch of info on repairing XP.

7

Toddly, the repair console does the same thing as trying to boot regularly; ditto trying to re-install. She has been doing system snapshots. I can fix it using those, if I can get the thing to boot into XP.

I’m hesitant to put her drive in my machine because I tend to have bad luck moving hardware around, but I think that’s the next solution on my list once I exhaust my options for trying to boot her machine.

If there’s a way to do a registry fix from a boot disk / boot CD, I can try it. I have at my disposal my own fully functional WinXP box with a working CD-R drive and a flaky-at-best floppy drive.

8

Jurph, did you change the boot sequence in the BIOS? And while you are there check out why the drive is being detected as a SCSI.

9

Toddly, believe me, if this were a matter of changing BIOS settings, I’d have had it solved in about ten minutes. To boot the CD-ROM first (and thereby use the Repair or Install features of the WinXP startup CD) I had to change the boot order. Right now, the boot order is

  1. CD-ROM
  2. Floppy (in case I need to use a boot disk)
  3. IDE-0

If it will make you feel better, I can change this boot order to anything you want. But if IDE-0 is before the CD-ROM or the floppy, I won’t be able to boot from the CD…

The BIOS is not detecting the drive as a SCSI – the BIOS knows that it’s an IDE device. WinXP (again – when I get it to boot!) occasionally mistakes the IDE drive for a SCSI drive with the same model number. Since file transfers on the C: drive were not affected (even when D: was acting up) I’m not going to try to solve the SCSI non-problem today.

10

Howyadoin,

Is is possible that in the process of connecting and disconnecting the D: drive, something might have come loose? The common denominator here seems to be the motherboard/memory/video… First off, go in and make sure everything is properly seated. Check the power supply cable to the motherboard, the RAM, all the cards… I’d disconnect both hard disks and attempt to boot to a DOS prompt with a floppy, then exercise the machine for a bit. Then connect the C: drive, and try to boot from CD…
Just a thought, good luck…

-Rav

11

On a machine like that Jurph are you sure there is no bios setting to change the nvram? If the nvram not cleared, it thinks the old stuff is still in the machine. Bioses should have a setting for a successful boot.

12

handy, I haven’t seen an NVRAM setting anywhere, but the machine has been powered down (and also switched off-on-off with the power cord out to drain off the capacitors in the system) several times since the problem surfaced. I’m not familiar with NVRAM – is it volatile? Oh, and there is a setting that reads (something like) “reset hardware configuration data on reboot” that I’ve set to “yes” because typically hardware changes cause minor glitches otherwise.

So here’s the next chapter of my saga: I’ve got the C: drive out of her machine and into mine, and as we speak, it thinks it’s my E: drive. I have the ability to copy files on and off of the drive. I suspect that there is a file in the registry that is somehow corrupt, and by searching my E: drive for files changed in the last 48 hours, I should be able to find the culprit.

Anyone want to toss out ideas for files that might be causing this kind of ruckus to narrow down the list?

13

I solved it!

For any Dopers who come after me, looking for help with similar, the key is digging an old restore point out of the System Volume Information folder in the root directory. You have one, it’s just very hidden.

14

Good one. I don’t think I would have thought of that. How did you apply the Restore Point on the attached drive?

15

Congrats, Jurph.

FYI, the NV in NVRAM stands for non-volatile.

16

Once you’ve got the drive migrated into a working XP machine, you need to go to your Folder Options and make sure that the check boxes are set to (a) view hidden files, and (b) view critical Operating System files. You will be warned that these are both bad ideas. Don’t sweat it.

In my case, the parasite drive was E:, so I went to E:\WINDOWS\system32\config and made backup copies of the files

default
sam
security
system
software

in that directory. I simply renamed them to *.bak, in case I (ha ha) wanted to restore to the previous, non-working condition. I went to the System Volume Information folder in E:, and after looking up how a WinXP Home user opens this file under NTFS, opened it successfully. (WinXP won’t let you open the folder, even as admin, but it will let you try to share the folder on the LAN. After this process fails, you are able to look at the contents of the folder. The process is different depending on the version of XP and the filesystem you’re using.)

In this folder, I found a sub-folder called “_restore{1756EDF7-C75F-481E-8EBF-9B466A0579E5}” (YMMV on the name) and opened it. Inside this, there was a cornucopia of folders called RPxxx, where “xxx” is a three-digit number. I opened the highest-numbered of these, and found a “snapshot” folder containing old, slightly-renamed, copies of the five files above (default and the four S-words, each with something like “USER.RESTORE.REGISTRY.” appended to the filename). I copied these to E:\WINDOWS\system32\config and then renamed them to the shortened forms of their names.

I powered my machine down, migrated the drive over to the ailing box, and the booted her machine into WinXP. The one oddity was that I had to re-activate her copy of WinXP on startup. Other than that, it was just like doing a manual system restore.

If you are lucky enough that you have access to the “recovery console,” you can perform this operation without a second computer, but it requires two leaps of faith. The first is to replace the five system files above with their original versions, typically found in C:\WINDOWS\repair, via the command-line interface of the Recovery Console. Your computer at this point will act like WinXP has been freshly installed. You may think you are completely hosed. Follow the steps above using the GUI, and if you’ve been a good boy and made restore points regularly, you should have your system back up and running in no time.

It’s like being able to manually force the use of a known good restore point in WinXP, regardless of whether WinXP wants you to know the restore point is there. Hope someone stumbles across this and it does some good.