I received a blue-screen error message, “KERNEL_APC_PENDING_DURING_EXIT.”
Upon rebooting it showed that “C:\Windows\System32\config\SYSTEM” was missing." I put in the recovery CD and pressed R to attempt the recovery console and everything. It would not go through because “sys reg does not have an Active Control Set Key.”
What does this mean? It suggests choosing the “Last good configuration.” But the problem is, when I choose this, the “C:\Windows\System32\config\SYSTEM” error prevents me from going any further.
Can anyone help? Thanks.
I don’t want to install XP all over again if it means I’d lose all the information saved on the current one.
Because I’ve lived with “The Good Folk” in my life, I’ve learned a thing or two about restoring registry pieces parts. I’ve become much better than I ever was at backing stuff up.
I’ve seen this error before. I made myself a note which references information from Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 823614. (A search for that number now turns up nothing. Perhaps I wrote it down wrong.) Anyway, it says to boot to the Recovery Console and run the following commands:
CD C:\Windows\System32\Config
REN system system.old
COPY c:\windows\Repair\System
reboot
Unfortunately you said that the Recovery Console won’t work. Is your hard drive formatted in FAT32 or NTFS? If the former you could start up with a Win98 boot disk and perform those same commands. If it’s NTFS it will be a little trickier.
“The Good Folk” must have used Windows 2000. XP doesn’t allow you to create an ERD.
See if you can get a friend to burn you a Bart’s PE Boot Disk. There are some other bootable utility disks which will also work.
Boot off it and try doing the rename and copy operations from my earlier post. If that doesn’t help then boot off your WinXP CD and do a repair. This is not the same as going into the Repair Console. At the first screen you have to select that you are installing Windows, then choose to repair your existing installation. It should replace all the system files without jeopardizing any of your data.
“The Good Folk” were quite mishcievious with my system.
No ERD in XP, huh?
Does XP automatically back up the registry? If so how often?
Oh, I see that it has ASR. I’ve not gotten my copy of XP yet.
Freak, If you can get an extra hd (or even a partition) I’d install an additional copy of your OS on it. This makes the rename and replace procedure not necessarily simpler, but less intimidating looking as you can do it using the your mouse rather than just command lines.
It doesn’t do anything different. It’s just done differently. It involves having another copy of the OS to boot into.
Then you can navigate the ususal way (point and click) to these folders and do it w/o command lines.
In Win2k you’d have to state where to put the copy of the System file from the Repair folder like this: copy c:\winnt\repair\system c:\winnt\system32\config
which I suppose for XP would be:
copy c:\windows\repair\system c:\windows\system32\config
However, in Win2k you have to have made a back up of the registry (usually via the ERD) for this to work well.
If the command lines are the same, you can
dir c:\windows\repair
and see how many copies of System you have in the Repair folder.
**
But, if you’re not able to reach the recovery console, where are you typing these commands?**
To make a new partition on a drive w/o deleting the drive’s contents (the usual way to start the process) you’d have to get something like Partition Magic, which may or may not be able to create a patrition out of free space on a drive.
If you wish to preserve the contents pf your old drive, it’d be simpler to get a new hd from the Goodwill. They carry old computers for around $30 down in Manassass. You could strip out a 4G hd fromone of them and go to town. Of course for $50 you can probably get a brand new drive of about 40G. But then you don’t get the rest of the computer to run experiments on.
But, like I said, having another copy of the OS doesn’t do anything different than the command lines that’ve already been suggested- it just allows for a different way of doing it.
A new hd would make it simpler to retrieve whatever data you have on your old one in anticipation of reinstalling XP. If you take this route go ahead and reformat and create at 4 partitions- one as you regular c: drive, one as a storage area to keep data that you wish to have preserved (I keep copies of my research and downloaded programs here), another to keep back ups of your C: drive on, and finally, a small one that has an additional copy of the OS. Also you should install the recovery console from your CD so that it becomes a boot option and you don’t have to muck about with your cd to get there.
After I press “r” to attempt the Recovery Console:
*The system registry does not appear to have an active ControlSet key. The system registry may be damaged.
If your system is not starting correctly, try the Last Known Good Configuration, or you can try repairing the installation of Windows using the setup program’s repair and recovery options.*
I didn’t realize the command was all on a single line, but it worked. When I rebooted, everything loaded fine up to the XP logo screen when it went blank with the monitor reading “Video Input, 1 D-Sub - Out of range.” This is an unrelated issue (probably), and one I’ve encountered in the past.
Since the monitor seems to be “in range” during boot up, I decided to try the Recovery Console just in case, and it starts correctly, but I need the administrator password, which I don’t ever remember making. Oh, well.
Thanks for your help and suggestions for saving my computer info, **PatriotX **and Number