USB not working after replacing registry hive files with ones from REPAIR folder

[Joe Grover]

My CEO came in yesterday with his son's Dell Dimension 9150. He said the
following happened:

- Son installed Neverwinter Nights 2 on the machine (Windows XP Home SP2).
- Ran NWN2 and it checked for updates, began installing.
- Updates failed, son tried running game.
- Game locked up, he restarted computer.
- Computer wouldn't boot. After post the screen would go black and nothing
would happen (no Windows XP logo, no nothing).
- Trying to boot with Last Known Good config did the same thing.
- Trying to boot safe mode got to system.log and then failed.

Of course they are unable to find the XP Home CD so I couldn't try doing a
repair. I tried using a Windows XP Pro w/ SP2 CD to get to the recovery
console, but received a BSOD STOP error (REGISTRY_ERROR) when trying to log
in.

Out of curiosity after making a ghost image of the drive I booted to the
Dell diagnostics partition and performed all tests (all of which passed). I
threw the drive in another XP machine so it could run chkdsk, which found
and repaired several issues with file links. The drive still would not boot
however (same errors as above).

So I renamed C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM to SYSTEM.OLD and copied an
old one from the REPAIR folder in its place, as A) the system.log is the
last thing to show when trying to boot into safe mode, and B) Neverwinter
Nights 2 entries are the last thing showing in the system.log file, which
coincides with the last thing the user did on the machine.

After replacing this file Windows now started to boot, however once the XP
logo went away a box flashed with the following message, then rebooted:

"LSASS.EXE - When trying to update a password, this return status indicates
that the value provided as the current password is not correct."

So I tried renaming C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SECURITY to SECURITY.OLD and
copied the old one from REPAIR in its place. After doing so and rebooting I
now received this error:

"LSASS.EXE - Security Accounts Manager initialization failed because of the
following error: A device attached to the system is not functioning.
Error Status: 0xc0000001
Please click OK to shut down this system and reboot in Safe Mode, check
event log for more detailed information."

This time I renamed C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SAM to SAM.OLD and copied the
old one from REPAIR in its place. This allowed me to boot into Windows just
fine.

However....

Now the USB ports don't seem to be responding to anything. They provide
power (I plugged in a USB card reader and the status light on the reader
came on), and they work fine outside of windows (keyboard/mouse work in the
Dell diagnostics partition), however Windows will not recognize any activity
from them. If I plug in a USB drive, or a USB mouse or whatever, nothing
happens on the screen and the device does not function. Unfortunately there
are no PS2 ports on the machine for me to try. I've left a USB keyboard and
mouse plugged in for over an hour but they never detect.

The machine itself is responsive, as I can put the XP Pro CD-ROM in the
drive and it spins up and launches the autorun, I simply don't have any
input devices to manipulate the machine.

Any ideas? :/

Joe

 

[C J.]

My CEO came in yesterday with his son's Dell Dimension 9150. He said the
following happened:

- Son installed Neverwinter Nights 2 on the machine (Windows XP Home SP2).
- Ran NWN2 and it checked for updates, began installing.
- Updates failed, son tried running game.
- Game locked up, he restarted computer.
- Computer wouldn't boot. After post the screen would go black and
nothing would happen (no Windows XP logo, no nothing).
- Trying to boot with Last Known Good config did the same thing.
- Trying to boot safe mode got to system.log and then failed.

Of course they are unable to find the XP Home CD so I couldn't try doing a
repair. I tried using a Windows XP Pro w/ SP2 CD to get to the recovery
console, but received a BSOD STOP error (REGISTRY_ERROR) when trying to
log in.

Out of curiosity after making a ghost image of the drive I booted to the
Dell diagnostics partition and performed all tests (all of which passed).
I threw the drive in another XP machine so it could run chkdsk, which
found and repaired several issues with file links. The drive still would
not boot however (same errors as above).

So I renamed C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM to SYSTEM.OLD and copied an
old one from the REPAIR folder in its place, as A) the system.log is the
last thing to show when trying to boot into safe mode, and B) Neverwinter
Nights 2 entries are the last thing showing in the system.log file, which
coincides with the last thing the user did on the machine.

After replacing this file Windows now started to boot, however once the XP
logo went away a box flashed with the following message, then rebooted:

"LSASS.EXE - When trying to update a password, this return status
indicates that the value provided as the current password is not correct."

So I tried renaming C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SECURITY to SECURITY.OLD
and copied the old one from REPAIR in its place. After doing so and
rebooting I now received this error:

"LSASS.EXE - Security Accounts Manager initialization failed because of
the following error: A device attached to the system is not functioning.
Error Status: 0xc0000001
Please click OK to shut down this system and reboot in Safe Mode, check
event log for more detailed information."

This time I renamed C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SAM to SAM.OLD and copied
the old one from REPAIR in its place. This allowed me to boot into
Windows just fine.

However....

Now the USB ports don't seem to be responding to anything. They provide
power (I plugged in a USB card reader and the status light on the reader
came on), and they work fine outside of windows (keyboard/mouse work in
the Dell diagnostics partition), however Windows will not recognize any
activity from them. If I plug in a USB drive, or a USB mouse or
whatever, nothing happens on the screen and the device does not function.
Unfortunately there are no PS2 ports on the machine for me to try. I've
left a USB keyboard and mouse plugged in for over an hour but they never
detect.
The machine itself is responsive, as I can put the XP Pro CD-ROM in the
drive and it spins up and launches the autorun, I simply don't have any
input devices to manipulate the machine.

Any ideas? :/

Joe

Joe,

Read this Article : support.microsoft.com/kb/307545 How to recover from a
corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting.

 

[Joe Grover]

Thanks for the link, but these are the steps I took to get the computer to
boot. Unfortunately the problem is that now that it boots up I have no
keyboard or mouse control as the USB does not appear to be initialized and
operational (though the ports work outside of Windows).

Joe

 

[C J.]

If your USB ports are on your mother board... then you probably should
reinstall the drivers for that. Did your Keyboard and mouse come with any
drivers on a disk? If no - then at least reinstall the drivers that shipped
with your motherboard and see if it will set up the USB ports.