SAM corruption - help!

[Guest]

My daughter and I have identical Dell Inspiron 8000s with factory-installed
Win2k. For unknown reasons mine had a catastrophic crash two days ago; I've
managed to get some control back, but it appears the SAM is corrupted so I
can't get into Recovery Console. For reasons which aren't yet clear I can't
get it to start up in Safe Mode either, so have no way of getting a command
Prompt.

I have System Recovery and Win2k reinstallation CDs, and Startup and ERD
disks. However, none of these will repair or reinstall SAM. I have 2 ideas to
check out:

1) swap my DVD writer into the other laptop and copy Win2k so that I can
install/repair rather than reinstall and thus hopefully get SAM back in

2) upgrade to XP for long enough to backup everything and then do a clean
install of Win2k, as I don't think the machine has the capability to run XP.

Any thoughts on these, r alternate ideas would be hugely appreciated!
(Please bear in mind that I'm not much of a techie but can follow
instructions!).

Thanks,

Mel.

 

[John John]

If you cannot use your ERD or if you cannot logon to the Recovery
Console to repair the corrupted SAM then you most likely have file
system or disk corruption issues. Normally you should be able to repair
the SAM database with the ERD. If you want to save your files you will
have to be careful, writing anything to a corrupt or failing hard disk
could corrupt the disk or files even more make any file recovery impossible.

The safest thing to do would be to mount the disk to another Windows
2000/XP computer and see if the files can be read and copied off the
damaged disk to another disk. You could also use a Bart's PE disk or a
Linux live cd to do this.

A second alternative would be to run a chkdsk /r from the recovery
console, but that isn't without risk! If the corruption is minor this
may easily repair the error(s) and permit Windows to boot again.
However if the disk is failing or if the file system corruption is
serious running chkdsk could render all the files on the disk useless.
This would be the first thing to try *after* you salvage your files or
if you have no other choice.

A third alternative would be to attempt a repair installation of Windows
2000. If you cannot repair Windows the next alternative would be to do
a parallel installation of Windows 2000, in other words install without
formating and install Windows in a different folder or partition than
where it is now installed. Once Windows is installed you can then
salvage your files. If the drive is failing or if there is significant
corruption on the disk this is absolutely a last ditch effort, the last
thing that should be tried. If the disk is failing attempting to write
on it could completely wreck everything!

Good luck,

John