Registry Failure - c0000218

[Guest]

I am unable to boot up my WinXP (SP2) desktop machine today due to the
following error:
STOP c0000218 Registry Failure
The registry cannot find the Hive(file) or it's log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent or not writeable.

The machine was working okay yesterday and was shut down okay last night. I
have done nothing knowingly to cause this problem but I am unable to get the
machine to boot at all, not even in safe mode. I just get the eror message
and another reboot !
I have a broadband connection and have autoupdate setup but I usually turn
the machine off overnight.
Anybody got any ideas what has caused this and, more importantly, how I
might fix the problem ??

Thanks.

 

[John John]

Oh boy, this is probably fixable but you need intermediate to advanced
skills to fix it. I hope that you know your way around the Recovery
Console and that your computer has a floppy drive for batch file
processing. I also hope that you had a backup of your data!

Read here:

How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from
starting
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=307545

John

 

[Guest]

Hi John,
Thanks for the response. I had a feeling fixing this was not going to be
easy (

I have not as yet been able to access KB307545 via IE - I keep getting told
it is not available. As soon as I get access and study it I might be able to
move forward.
In the meantime I have been reading postings to other similar/identical
problems and it would appear I am likely to have a hardware problem. However,
until I can get the machine up and running in some form or other I cannot
begin to investigate !

Re your comment on backup, I recently purchased a buffalo drivestation for
precisely this situation, but so far have had trouble trying to get the
included third party "Memeo" autobackup software to give me a backup of the
whole system partition. I shall have to wait and see what I can salvage from
the Buffalo drive.
Alternatively, my system disk is mirrored ( 2 x 80GB) so hopefully I can
reclaim my data somehow from the mirror disk, although I have no experience
of doing this ?

Thanks again for your response.

 

[John John]

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that you have hardware problems just
yet. But the files or file system on the drive may be mucked up,
something that might be fixable with a chkdsk, but don't do that yet!
Try the other fix first. When you say "mirrored" do you mean mirrored
as in RAID-1?

John

 

[Guest]

Hi John,
Boy am I having fun ( I don't think !).
Let me try and clarify where I am and what has happened recently, as follows:

The pc is a shuttle, small footprint machine. I built it myself a couple of
years ago from a "barebones" kit (ie I just assembled it really). It has 2 x
80 gb SATA hard drives which I mirrored via the onboard RAID software (RAID
1). There is no floppy disk drive, but there are usb connections and I have a
couple of memory sticks ( 1gb and 512Mb).
The machine is running WinXP with SP2 installed. Internet connection is via
broadband and I have autoupdate setup to run around 9:00 pm each night,
although I do switch the machine off every night, sometimes too early
sometimes not.

Okay, now since we last spoke I have managed to gain access to KB307545 and
have read through it and it seems straightforward. I also have copies of
KB309531 and KB822705 and I have printouts of all three.
I do not have any experience of the system recovery facility but I am about
learn no doubt ;o)

I have just booted the machine up from the cdrom and, after a short period
of loading files, got to the "Welcome to setup" menu.
I selected R for recovery and immediately got the following setup message:

"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer"
This was followed by some general advice about checking disks are powered up
and then the final comment
"Setup cannot continue, to quit setup press F3".
Pressing F3 rebooted the machine.

I tried the process again and observed that the file loading was mainly
drivers and did mention RAID controller among the files). However I then got
the same error message from setup - that it could not find any hard drives !

If you can offer any advice at all, short of re-installing windows and
starting all over again, then my weekend might just get a little brighter.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

 

[John John]

Whoa! Hold the presses! This is now a completely different ball of
wax! If the files on the mirror are not damaged you might be able to
boot off the mirror with a fault tolerant boot floppy. Try that first,
start reading here and follow the links in the articles for repair
options: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=323432&SD=tech

When you see information about NT4 & RAID much of it also applies to
Windows XP, the differences may only be minor.

If you must go to the Recovery Console and do the registry fix
(KB307545) you need the RAID drivers on a floppy diskette and right when
the Windows XP setup program starts you have to press F6 to load the
"Mass Storage Device" drivers. As per instructions in other articles
concerning mirror recovery you also need these drivers for the fault
tolerant boot floppy.

John

 

[Guest]

Hi John, apologies for the delay in responding to your advice but it has been
a really difficult process trying to determine a fix, let me explain.
Re your last advice - I was not sure what you meant by a "fault tolerant"
boot floppy, but the situation with my shuttle machine was that it did not
have a floppy drive fitted, nor could I fit one behind the faceplate since
the available space was taken up by my second hard drive.
Also, my second pc only has windows 98 SE and so there was no point in
creating a boot floppy from that, since I did not know how to ammend the
boot.ini file for XP.

I did manage to borrow a friends winXP laptop and I managed to create a boot
floppy on it,as per KB305595. I then managed to salvage a floppy drive and
"connect" it to the shuttle (don't ask !). However the boot up failed due to
some sort of device recognition problem ( I did not make a note) and I
presumed this was probably caused by the RAID setup on the shuttle not being
identified in the boot.ini file.

Anyway there was a flicker of hope in that I had a floppy drive running and
I also had a floppy diskette with the RAID drivers on. So I tried plan B and
booted from the cdrom, pressed F6 and succesfully loaded the RAID drivers.
This let me gain access to the recovery console and so I followed the manual
steps in KB397545 and managed to successfully replace the corrupt registry
with a snapshot from October 1.
The good news is that the machine is now back up and running and everything
now seems fine, except I do not know what caused the registry corruption in
the first place ? I'd better carry on looking through the knowledge base for
ideas on diagnosis.
I am eternally gratefull to you for the valuable advice, and for directing
me towards the usefull KB papers.
Many, many thanks.

I have a couple of outstanding "queries" with regard to moving forwards and
if you have any usefull advice I would certainly welcome it:

(1) I wish to create a bootable disk for my winXP setup for future support.
Since the shuttle has no floppy drive and I cannot fit one, if I purchased a
USB external floppy drive would this be useable for boot up ?
Would the WinXP cdrom bootup recognise the existence of an external floppy
for adding the RAID drivers at bootup, or will it only look for drives A and
B (presumably the external USB floppy might be given a drive letter such as
"E" like a USB memory stick) ?
Alternatively, is there any way I can use a memory stick as a bootable
device ?
Alternatively, can the boot up files be burned to a cd so as to make a
bootable cd ?
(5)If yes to all 3, which would you favour for flexibility and ease of use ?

(2) I did not understand the paper KB113977 at all and even if I managed to
create the FT boot floppy I was not sure how to create the ARC path in the
boot.ini file, specifically for my setup. Also, the paper does not elaborate
about breaking the mirror and configuring a new boot and system partition. Do
you know of any other papers (or books) that might help ?

Once again Many thanks for your help.
Best Regards

 

[Patrick Keenan]

Hi John, apologies for the delay in responding to your advice but it has
been
a really difficult process trying to determine a fix, let me explain.
Re your last advice - I was not sure what you meant by a "fault tolerant"
boot floppy, but the situation with my shuttle machine was that it did not
have a floppy drive fitted, nor could I fit one behind the faceplate since
the available space was taken up by my second hard drive.
Also, my second pc only has windows 98 SE and so there was no point in
creating a boot floppy from that, since I did not know how to ammend the
boot.ini file for XP.

I did manage to borrow a friends winXP laptop and I managed to create a
boot
floppy on it,as per KB305595. I then managed to salvage a floppy drive and
"connect" it to the shuttle (don't ask !). However the boot up failed due
to
some sort of device recognition problem ( I did not make a note) and I
presumed this was probably caused by the RAID setup on the shuttle not
being
identified in the boot.ini file.

Anyway there was a flicker of hope in that I had a floppy drive running
and
I also had a floppy diskette with the RAID drivers on. So I tried plan B
and
booted from the cdrom, pressed F6 and succesfully loaded the RAID drivers.
This let me gain access to the recovery console and so I followed the
manual
steps in KB397545 and managed to successfully replace the corrupt registry
with a snapshot from October 1.
The good news is that the machine is now back up and running and
everything
now seems fine, except I do not know what caused the registry corruption
in
the first place ? I'd better carry on looking through the knowledge base
for
ideas on diagnosis.
I am eternally gratefull to you for the valuable advice, and for directing
me towards the usefull KB papers.
Many, many thanks.

I have a couple of outstanding "queries" with regard to moving forwards
and
if you have any usefull advice I would certainly welcome it:

(1) I wish to create a bootable disk for my winXP setup for future
support.
Since the shuttle has no floppy drive and I cannot fit one, if I purchased
a
USB external floppy drive would this be useable for boot up ?

This should work fine, within the limitations of a floppy disk, limitations
like lack of easy NTFS support.

This is part of why the XP CD is bootable. Win9x boot floppies are
normally useless for repairs since they cannot access NTFS drives, and XP
does not offer formatting FAT32 on drives above 40 gig or so.

Would the WinXP cdrom bootup recognise the existence of an external floppy
for adding the RAID drivers at bootup, or will it only look for drives A
and
B (presumably the external USB floppy might be given a drive letter such
as
"E" like a USB memory stick) ?

I have a USB floppy drive, and I just checked it on two systems, my desktop
(which has a floppy drive) and my Thinkpad (which does not).

On the Desktop, the existing installed floppy is A and the USB floppy drive
became B. On my Thinkpad, the USB floppy becomes the A drive.

Setup should have no difficulties recognising the USB floppy and the files
on it, as long as the system itself recognises it. You may need to adjust
system settings to permit booting from USB drives and to move the floppy up
in the boot sequence.

Alternatively, is there any way I can use a memory stick as a bootable
device ?

This is apparently possible but I've never been able to make that work.
There are apparently BIOS dependencies.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx

Alternatively, can the boot up files be burned to a cd so as to make a
bootable cd ?

You used a bootable CD to get to the recovery console! There are a number
of other bootable CD images you can use for recovery, some of which are
based on Linux. They can be very useful. I've used Astrumi a couple of
times.

If you aren't aware of this, simply copying the files to the CD (or any
other media) does not make it bootable.

At the very least, you could make a bootable copy of your XP CD and add a
folder to it with the RAID support files you need, and when they're asked
for, just tell Setup where they are on the CD. While you're at it, if your
XP CD isn't SP2, slipstream this in. Sites detailing slipstreaming also
show how to extract the boot file images from your XP CD and the other
settings ( like emulation and number of sectors) required to make the CD
actually boot.

HTH
-pk

 

[John John]

Sometimes the only access to the drive controller is with a diskette
drive. In case of emergency if you cannot gain access to the controller
you might not be able boot Windows NT. Put a diskette drive in your
computer.

John

 

[Guest]

Hi Patrick,
Excellent response to my questions.
Many thanks for the info.

 

[Zilbandy]

Oh boy, this is probably fixable but you need intermediate to advanced
skills to fix it. I hope that you know your way around the Recovery
Console and that your computer has a floppy drive for batch file
processing. I also hope that you had a backup of your data!

I'm glad I use ERUNT to backup my registry. It can be restored without
having to launch windows to do it.