Trying to help a friend's PC boot up

My friend's PC is not booting up.
He said he got an update and it started failing after that, but that comment didn't make sense to me.

On a normal boot attempt, I see this message:

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Stop: C0000218 (Registry File Failure)
The Registry cannot load the hive (file); \Systemroot\System32\config\Software or its log or alternate
It is corrupt, absent, or not writeable

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I also tried a Safe Boot and a "last known good configuration", but with same results.

I also booted up to an XP Install CD and attempted an XP re-install/Repair, but I received this message:

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This partition is either too full, damaged, not formatted, or formatted with an incompatible file system.
To continue installing Windows, setup must format this partition.

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Please help, what else can I try to resolve this problem?
I can always attempt a reformat, but I'm trying to avoid destroying his data.

I'm going to google C0000218, but thought I'd try here first.

Thanks!

You might want to consider removing the hard drive from his system and attaching it to a working system, then check out some things. If you can read the files on that drive, consider copying off anything he would not want to lose. Also, check to see if the drive has very little free space, since that could be the problem. You may also want to run the drive manufacturer's diagnostics on the drive to see if any errors are found.

I removed the drive and installed it in another PC as a USB / External drive.
I ran Super Spyware and MS Essentials on it (removed a couple items, but nothing significant). I also ran an XP Tools\Error-check on it (took forever to complete).

Anything else that would be suggested?

Unfortunately, when I re-installed it back in the original PC and attempted to boot it up, the PC is now emitting some kind of error tones (I think it was 3 long beeps, but I'll have to check again).
I ran out of time last night, so I 'll try again when I get home tonight.
Any idea what the beeps are about now??

How much free space was on the drive? What were the scandisk results?

Post the make and model of the computer or the motherboard so we can determine what the BIOS beeps indicate.

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Originally Posted by MPTech

... the PC is now emitting some kind of error tones (I think it was 3 long beeps, but I'll have to check again).

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Just fixed a Vista eMachine that was doing the same thing today ... three beeps and then 'nada' (nothing, no boot). A quick search on Google led me to believe the three beeps might be a RAM problem so I unplugged the two 1GB RAM modules, switched slots, plugged 'em right back in and it booted right up. (?!) Ran Windows Memory Diagnostic and everything appeared to be OK. Don't know what caused the problem, and don't really care. <shrug> Customer's happy. :)

The drive is only half full (about 120 gig of free space on a 230g drive).
The scandisk said it copied error files to a "Found" folder, but I didn't bother to look at it.

I'll post the make & model tonight, and also take a look at the RAM. (hope it's that easy!)

Thanks so far!

I reseated each stick of Ram and the beeps went away and it attempted to boot, but same problem. Still getting the error: C0000218 (Registry File Failure)
The Registry cannot load the hive (file)

Looks like it's a: Dell DHM P4
The HDD says: mediamax WL250GSA1672 (?? never heard of it before :D)

http://www.amazon.com/Cavalry-7200rp...ews/B004DTV1LQ

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White Label drives are ones that have failed in the field and have been repaired at a facility other than the original manufacturer's. The law and original manufacturer then require that the repair facility remove or hide the original manufacturer's label and replace it with one of their own. Thus, the repair facility applies a "White Label" over the original label to hide it from view. These are basically re-manufactured/repaired or re-certified hard drives. They may very well not be new or unused. Some of the Calvary branded external hard drives have MediaMax labeled hard drives in them.

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http://www.techsupportforum.com/foru...sa-518494.html

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I stupidly bought a 2TB white-label WL2000GSA3272 Mediamax 3.5 inch hard drive for $110. The price per byte was good, but the hard drive was the worst driver I ever bought. I generally purchase approx $200 to $400 in hard drives per year (for last 10 years). This was the largest single drive I bought. As soon as I emptied 5 other drives onto it (1.3 TB), the drive died. I heard that Western Digital made this drive for a generic OEM, but the WD Data Life Tool software said it is not a Western Digital drive and would not work! I tried Seagate, Maxtor, and 5 other hard drive software utilities to try to bring it back to life. Nobody's SW would work on it. I think it's because they changed the model from a WD2000... to a WL2000GSA when they made it. This keeps ALL hard drive SW from recognizing it and performing any repair operations on it. I found one SW that will scan for bad sectors, but it's been running for 4 days and has 13 days left! NEVER BUT THIS CHEAP NO-NAME DRIVE! If you look for support, you will not find it (not even on the MediaMax website!). I just lost several years of data that I spent days of my life to acquire, format, organize, etc. I'm trying to recover the data from my original 5 drives, but I cut the files instead of copying them.. Oh well... In future, all 2TB+ drives will have to be cloned in RAID.

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Google: mediamax hard drive

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Dell DHM P4

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If you look on the back or sometimes the side of the computer you'll find a white tag with some numbers or even numbers with letters, this is called the Service Tag. If you post those here, we can find exactly what that model Dell your friend has. From googling what you posted, it seems this computer is a GX model but there are several of those and with the tag number, we could find exactly which one.

Let me give it a shot....

You will need a USB flash drive.

Download GETxPUD.exe to the desktop of your clean computer

• Run GETxPUD.exe
• A new folder will appear on the desktop.
• Open the GETxPUD folder and click on the get&burn.bat
• The program will download xpud_0.9.2.iso, and upon finished will open BurnCDCC ready to burn the image.
• Click on Start and follow the prompts to burn the image to a CD.
• Next download rst.sh to your USB flash drive
• Remove the USB & CD and insert it in the sick computer
• Boot the Sick computer with the CD you just burned
• The computer must be set to boot from the CD
• Gently tap F12 and choose to boot from the CD
• Follow the prompts
• A Welcome to xPUD screen will appear
• Press File
• Expand mnt
• sda1,2...usually corresponds to your HDD
• sdb1 is likely your USB
• Click on the folder that represents your USB drive (sdb1 ?)
• Confirm that you see rst.sh that you downloaded there
• Press Tool at the top
• Choose Open Terminal
• Type bash rst.sh
• Press Enter
• After it has finished a report will be located on your USB drive named enum.log
• Remove the USB drive and insert it back in your working computer and navigate to enum.log
  
  Please note - all text entries are case sensitive

Copy and paste the enum.log for my review

sounds like a plan, I'll give it a shot tonite

Thanks Broni

sorry, family obligations last 2 nites.

back at it tonite.
I ran another check of the HDD in another PC and it checked out with no errors, so I re-installed back in the original PC and rebooted, same error "Stop: C0000218 (Registry File Failure)"

followed your directions Broni. no luck there either.
rebooted with xPUD CD 4 times:

• first 2 times, received a message "searching for restore points.... please wait", then it locked up
• 3rd time, it rebooted, but no .log file on the USB (I checked from xPUD that the rst.sh file was on the USB (sdb 1 drive)
• 4th time, same as the first 2

I don't want to spend much more time on it. Is there a way to get his iTunes stuff off and back it up?
I can reformat and re-install XP, but he asked me to save his iTunes (for the record, I HATE iTunes)

suggestions?

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I ran another check of the HDD in another PC

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That would be the fastest way to get his songs backed up.
There are some other ways but since you can't even boot the system from an external source something else is up there.

The original error means corrupted hives.
Could be number of reasons why it happened.
Apparently you eliminated bad drive but there may be other culprits.
Bad RAM maybe?

btw, I couldn't find any other model numbers, but I did look up the serial number on Dell and found this:


Dell DHM OptiPlex GX280


Microprocessor
Microprocessor type
Intel® Pentium® 4; design provides for future Dell-supported upgrades.
Level 1 (L1) cache
32 KB
Level 2 (L2) cache
1 MB pipelined-burst, eight-way set associative, write-back SRAM
Memory
Type
400 & 533 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Memory connectors
small form-factor computer: 2
small desktop computer: 4
desktop computer: 4
small mini-tower computer: 4
mini-tower computer: 4

Memory capacities
128 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB, or 1 GB non-ECC
Minimum memory
dual-channel: 256 MB
single-channel: 128 MB
Maximum memory
small form-factor computer: 2 GB
small desktop computer: 4 GB
desktop computer: 4 GB
small mini-tower computer: 4 GB
mini-tower computer: 4 GB

BIOS address
F0000h
Computer Information
Chipset
Intel Grantsdale
Data bus width
64 bits
Address bus width
32 bits
DMA channels
eight
Interrupt levels
24
BIOS chip (NVRAM)
4-Mb
Memory speed
400 & 533 MHz
NIC
integrated network interface with ASF 1.03 support as defined by DMTF.
Capable of 10/100/1000 communication:
Green — A good connection exists between a 10-Mbps network and the computer.
Orange — A good connection exists between a 100-Mbps network and the computer.
Yellow — A good connection exists between a 1 Gb (or 1000-Mbps) network and the computer.
Off — The computer is not detecting a physical connection to the network.
Video Type
integrated Intel Extreme Graphics or PCI Express x16 DVI video card
Audio Type
AC97, Sound Blaster emulation
Stereo conversion
16-bit analog-to-digital; 20-bit digital-to-analog
Controllers
Drives
small form-factor: one serial ATA controller supporting one device and one parallel Ultra ATA/100 IDE supporting two devices per channel with one channel

small desktop: one serial ATA controllers supporting one device each and one parallel Ultra ATA/100 IDE supporting two devices per channel with one channel

desktop: two serial ATA controllers supporting one device each and one parallel Ultra ATA/100 IDE supporting two devices per channel with one channel.

small mini-tower: two serial ATA controllers supporting one device each and one parallel Ultra ATA/100 IDE supporting two devices per channel with one channel

mini-Tower: two serial ATA controllers supporting one device each and one parallel Ultra ATA/100 IDE supporting two devices per channel with one channel

Expansion Bus
Bus type
PCI 2.2
SATA 1.0a
USB 2.0
PCI Express 1.0a
Bus speed
PCI: 33 MHz
SATA: 1.5 Gbps
USB: 480 Mbps
PCI Express x1: 5 Gbps
PCI Express x16: 80 Gbps

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Dell DHM OptiPlex GX280

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That model is notorious for having bad caps on the motherboard.
http://www.badcaps.net/

I don't think (and hope) it's a cap problem.
It boots up to xPUD from a CD just fine.

I'd run the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic next. If you get an error there, the hard drive is failing and needs to be replaced.

To run the diags, download and burn the Ultimate Boot CD to CD. It has all the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utilities, (plus much more). Simply boot your computer from this CD and select the utility you want to run.

If you aren't sure who made the hard drive in your computer, use Seagate's Seatools as it will work with most any make of drive.

The following instructions may prove helpful for burning the UBCD .iso file to disc: How can I write (burn) ISO files to CD or DVD?

just to make sure I tried everything, this morning I tried:
Booting to last known configuration
Booting to Safe Mode
Normal Boot
all of these resulted in the "Stop: C0000218 (Registry File Failure)"

I also tried the Ultimate Boot CD. It boots to it, but from there, I'm not certain what to try. I ran a drive diagnostic and it came back clean. I did see a post when I googled C0000218 that said they resolved it with UBCD "Registry Restore Wizard", but I didn't see that in the menu. I'll check again.

I also tried XPRecovery, but asked for Administrator Password and I don't know it (any suggestion for Admin Password?)

And last but not least, I tried XP Re-install, but stopped when it said: "Installing multiple OS on a single partition is not recommended".
I haven't done an XP re-install for awhile, but I don't remember this message.

Here's what Microsoft Support has on that "Stop: C0000218 (Registry File Failure)" error: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830084

As far as the password goes, VirtualDr's Acceptable Use Policy does not allow its members to assist anyone in the recovery of lost passwords. Due to the open, public nature of this forum, any assistance given to help circumvent security measures, even for legitimate purposes, would be available for unscrupulous individuals to use for illegitimate purposes. This is a risk that VirtualDr cannot take.

If you have a legitimate need to circumvent a password scheme, please contact the vendor for the software / hardware and request their assistance. E.g. Windows XP password recovery issues should be taken up with Microsoft, Phoenix BIOS password recovery issues should be taken up with Phoenix Technologies, Dell's "this system is protected by a password authenication system" should be taken up with Dell tech support, etc. ...

I understand the password issue.
I'm SOL, it's my friend's PC and I think it was bought as a refurb (given the MediaMax HDD and a couple stickers on the case).

I'm about to save what's on the HDD and re-install xP from scratch.
I don't know what will happen to his iTunes, that's a whole nother story (did I say I hate iTunes??)