catastrophic media failure ???

hi guys,

just got a customers machine in for repair they have got this following message up whenever they try to login.


The system cannot log you on due to the following error :

unable to complete the requested operation becuase of either a catastrophic media failure or a data structure corruption on the disk.

i have searched the knowledge base

and found this

here http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;155012

this is the part that applies to this

1358L ERROR_INTERNAL_DB_CORRUPTION This error indicates the
requested operation cannot be
completed due to a
catastrophic media failure or
on-disk data structure
corruption.


but it applys on

Microsoft Windows NT Server
Microsoft Windows NT Workstation

but i cant see any reference to xp.

can anybody help.

Note : i installed xp about a month ago for them.

thanx mike :)

also would restoring the registry work ? ie retore them from the backup folder ? or is the user profiles corrupt ?

the cd is corrupt, do you have another backup?

Hi there its actually on there hard disk! i have checked the floppy disk drives and cdroms.

or do you mean the original cd was corrupt ? it was a tiny restore disk.

also if i was going to reinstall windows in the same directory would i lose all their user accounts ?

thanx for replying mike :)

it could be either, cd or harddisk corruption.

installing overtop will leave the accounts there, but your installed software will likely need to be reinstalled to work correctly.

ok i will try that then thanx :)

hi guys i have fixed this :)

this is how i fixed it for others who may experience this problem as i could not find the answer on the kb or anywhere on the net.


i found it was a corrupt registry. see q307545 on knowledge base.

but i could not use the recovery console because it would not accept the administrator password i believe that the user profile section was corrupt.

so i put the hard disk into a windows 2000 machine and copied the registry files from the repair folder so i could boot windows.

i then followed the knowledge base article 307545 from part 3 onwards.

thanks again Asendin for your input.

mike :)