Registry Corruption: A Case of Good RAID Gone Baid

[rider]

Recently experienced a crash after which the computer would not reboot.

Starting into the Intel Matrix Storage Manager showed an error on one of the
four hard drives. The status of the Volume 0 was degraded, but bootable. The
status of Volume 1 was normal and bootable. Starting into the Windows
Recovery Options from the Vista installation disk, the Startup Repair tool
was run several times. Eventually, it reported that no problem could be
found. Attempts to reboot (in just about every available mode) failed with
Error 0xc0000001 reported. The System Recovery tool failed as no system
restore point could be found. The Command Prompt tool was used to run
CHKDSK. Even after running CHKDSK, the Intel Matrix Storage Manager reports
the same status as mentioned in the above paragraph.

An observation that may offer insight into the problem. The error code
suggests a registry corruption in the Security Accounts Manager. Drilling
through the C: drive using the Command Prompt tool, I notice that in the
directory C:\Windows\System32\Config there exists a file named SAM, but not
one named SAM.sav. The significance of this I do not know.

I've run out of ideas and would appreciate suggestions on how the OS might
be savaged.

Vista Ultimate 64-bit
Intel D975XBX2 motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
2GB DDR2 800MHz memory
(4) 250GB hard drives divided into:
Volume 0: Windows [RAID 10 (RAID 0+1)]
Volume 1: Multimedia [RAID 0 (stripe)]
computer expertise: intermediate, but fearless

 

[rider]

Further thought... The OS volume was configured in RAID 10 which includes
mirroring. Shouldn't a copy of the registry be available somewhere on that
volume?

 

[Mike Matheny]

rider pretended :

Further thought... The OS volume was configured in RAID 10 which includes
mirroring. Shouldn't a copy of the registry be available somewhere on that
volume?

Have you tried a repair install yet?

 

[grahamham]

From the looks of it you need to replace the faulty hard drive and rebuild
the RAID, you might get away with full formating the faulty drive and
rebuilding RAID. I have in the past been able to fix drives by full
formating that were reported faulty by the drive diagnostics boot disc you
get from manufactures websites, but not in a RAID setup
But you should still be able to boot from the RAID 10, so it looks like you
have two problems , the Volume 0 was degraded and the windows boot problem.
I have not got a scooby on how to fix the windows boot problem. ive been
doing a complete PC backup every month to an external USB drive and just
hopping that a complete PC restore will work when i need to use it.

You might find a better answer about RAID here;
http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/index.htm
Got a similar setup, been meaning to read up on this in case it happens to
me but not had the time yet. let us know how you get on.

 

[rider]

Have you tried a repair install yet?

My understanding is that the "repair install" feature available through
the recovery console in Windows XP is not available in Vista. It has been
replaced with the Windows Recovery Options accessed by clicking the "repair
this computer" button on the second screen appearing during the Vista
installation DVD startup. Those options were explored thoroughly before
submitting the original post.

If there is another way to do a repair install, please advise.