7th June 2002
When good systems go bad, Lockergnomie Cosimo Stufano's tip might help: "My registry was corrupt. Of course, I did not know it at first. I only knew that during the Windows boot process, there was a blue screen with some error message on it. Before I could read anything, the screen went blank again and the computer rebooted (and so on, endlessly). How can you find out what's happening? Booting form the CD to the recovery console and running chkdsk produced no errors. Booting form the hard disk (even in Safe Mode or with Command Prompt) only resulted in the unreadable blue screens and the auto-reboot. Then I got an idea: my digital camera. After several tries, I finally got a picture of the vanishing blue screen. Now, after booting Linux, I could finally look at the error in the face: 'STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure} | The registry cannot load the hive (file) | \SYSTEMROOT\System32\Config\SOFTWARE | or its log or alternate.' A search on Microsoft's KB produced Q307545, which explains how to do a manual System Restore. My computer is up again, having only lost the changes made in the past week (including the most recent Internet Explorer patch)." To turn off auto-reboots: right-click My Computer | Properties | Advanced | Startup and Recovery Settings | ALT+R.