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Hi,
My son disconnected my PC the other day accidentally. Since that time, when I boot up it gets to the loading drivers stage (as shown by booting in safe mode) and right around the m/n (alphabetical) stage it stops and automatically reboots!
If I boot normally, it reboots at the Win2k splash screen. I see a BSOD for a fraction of a second first but can't read it, although I think I saw a "dumping physical memory" message. (I know, when I get it working I'll change the autoreboot "feature"!)
I've tried all the F8 options, emergency boot disk, etc. Nothing works. I've done a detailed HD examination (using ChkDsk and Dell diagnostics) and everything seems fine.
One last note: Like other posters I've been noticing, under normal conditions I can't shutdown automatically (it "shuts down by rebooting"). Also, I've had problems with it spontaneously powering down in the past, but it's very rare (once every other month or so). I upgraded my BIOS to the latest like a year ago (Dell Dimension H266 with A03 BIOS).
Suggestions!? Help? I'm running out of ideas...
- Jason
Hi bdxl,
Already tried that, no luck. I tried the auto-repair option and the console repair (that's how I got it to run chkdsk), neither made a difference.
- Jason
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I'll assume you mean your son cut your power to the computer. If the HD was being written to it could have corrupted system files. Checkdisk doesn't check the validity of the files, just their attributes compared to the File Allocation Table.
I agree with dbxl, do the repair. (he beat me to the punch, but then, so does grandma.;-)
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Yup, I tried booting with boot logging on. I never saw any options, just the splash screen and the inevitable reboot. When I try booting in safe mode it is loading mup.sys when it crashes. So, I tried a few things. First, I copied over mup.sys using the copy from dllcache. No luck. Then I tried overwriting the cache with the \driver copy. No luck. Finally, I disabled mup.sys from loading. (Using the very cool "disable" command available when booting off the Win2k Console repair option.
Now, it hangs at NDIS.sys. Makes me suspicious about it actually being a corrupt system file. A friend suggested it might be corrupt memory, and when I get to a certain address space (thus the defective memory) it fails... not a bad guess I suppose. I'm going to try that when I get home tonight. I doubt that memory would just suddenly be defective but who knows, maybe the sudden power-down screwed it up. Any other ideas???
- Jason
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try disabling on board usb and nic from the bios if you have them.
If you still can't go from there the most likely cause is a corrupt file system. If it is NTFS you the only two options are to use a product from Winternals to recover the system or do a fresh install.
My bet is on the corrupt file system. Not good news.
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Ouch. Here's your answer:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B174630
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I got it working! Good link bdxl, I found that same one on the 14th as well. I tried everything I could to avoid that but no luck, I ended up doing what they recommended.
I tried a few simple things but the bottom line was I couldn't do very much from the Recovery console. For some (stupid) reason, Win2k only lets you run the programs IT provides. I had a couple of command-line utilties but it wouldn't let me run them. (Or even native Win2k command-line utilities).
So, I was going to overwrite Win2k and reinstall... but it warned me that all of my settings would be lost AND my documents would get wiped! That wasn't acceptable... so, I installed it to a different directory on a 2 GB partition that I hadn't allocated yet.
I booted into that installation, and used it to open the registry from the first installation. I changed the auto-reboot setting to off (that is the stupidest feature, I don't know why it's even an option, must less an option enabled by default!)
Anyway, once I did that I rebooted into the original installation. As usual, I got the BSOD, but this time I could read the message! Turned out that it was a problem with the registry "software" hive. I rebooted into the other installation, overwrote that hive with a backup copy (from July!) and rebooted.
It worked! Problem was gone. Some programs acted like I was new, and I had to reset a couple of settings which took all of five minutes.
Takeaways:
1) ALWAYS disable auto-reboot on any machine that you are administrating!2) Win2k Recovery console is very limited. Having a 3.5" disk (or several) that allow you to run 32-bit command-line utilities and read NTFS would be very valuable, I believe there are some utilities out there to create such a boot disk, I'm going to try and find one myself to avoid future problems like this.
(It's a load of crap that you have to create a whole new installation of Windows just to edit the registry, when there are small simple tools like reg.exe that allows you to do it from the command line!)
3) Make frequent backup copies of your registry.
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