In The Trenches: Reviving the Dead Windows 2000 Professional Page 2

Thomas Shinder

A New Blue Screen Error!

I’ve learned to accept the Blue Screens as
normal while working, but when they show up during the boot sequence, then its
time to sweat. The BSOD message I got was along the lines “Registry Error:
cannot write to HKLMSoftware, its missing. Corrupt, or something else real
bad”. Huh? That was an entirely new one for me.

What could it have been? A virus? A single
corrupted registry file? A wholesale disk error? I had no idea what might have
led up to it. A virus scan was done the night before and no viruses were
identified. The machine was actually up for almost 3 days, approaching a record!
So, what would you do next?

What I did was turn the machine off, and then
back on again. That didnt help. I then started the Recovery Console and did a

chkdsk on the boot partition. The chkdsk program said there were errors found on
the drive and that they have been repaired. Great! I typed exit to
restart the computer from the Recovery Console and boom! The same Blue Screen
error appeared.

What next? How about trying the Last Known Good
Configuration? That didnt do it. Now it was time to bring out the big guns. I
loaded the Windows 2000 Professional CD into the tray and booted the CD so that
I could do an Emergency Repair. It asked for the ERD. Not having one, I told the
Emergency Repair Program to search the hard disk. That has always worked before.
Windows 2000 searched the drives for a previous installation of Windows 2000 and
bang!

Huh? How can that be? I was just in the Recovery
Console and it found the installation just fine! I figured I must be the victim
of some sort of punishment for the article I had just finished writing on the
changes in the MCT program. It looked like I was at the end of my rope. There
was no way I could initiate the Emergency Repair process if Windows 2000 could
not find the previous operating system.