Security Account Manager Initializatioin Failed

[Nick]

Security Account Manager Initializatioin Failed because of
the following error: The security ID structure is
invalid. Error status 0xc0000078. Please click ok shut
down and reboot into safe mode, check the event log for
more detailed information.

But, Windows 2000 won't get to a login promt either in
normal or safe mode. Also when going into recovery consol
it doesn't prompt for the Administrator password.

Please help.

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Try booting from the install cdrom and follow the prompts to the point that install
will detect your operating system hopefully and ask if you want to repair the
existing installation. At that point select repair and do a fast repair. This should
all happen BEFORE you get to the End User License Agreement screen where you have to
select F8 to continue. See the link below for details. If that does not work you
will want to try an upgrade install.--- Steve

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;238359
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;292175

 

[Diana Smith [MSFT]]

Hello Nick,

This normally indicates that you have a corrupt sam or registry file on this
machine.

Do you have a backup of this machine? If you have a backup please restore
from the backup.

Thank You.

Diana
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Nick]

This worked. I have a feeling the HD is going bad.
Originally I just tried resotring to a different HD, that
was bigger than the original. But that doesn't work to
well with GHOST.

On our server we had a similar problem, got NTLDR missing
and ntoskrnl.exe missing errors. Even after booting to
the recovery console and re-copying the files off of the
Windows CD. We are trying to upgrade the HDs in our
domain controller running Windows 2000 Server, and was
using Norton Ghost. I'm thinking about trying Power Quest
Drive image to see if it works any better.

Thanks,
Nick