Computer Nerds: Help a guy out....

  • Thread starter Thread starter ChuckU
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ChuckU

ChuckU

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I am hosed right now with my DAW.

I can't get it to boot up at all. As it gets ready to start Windows, I get an evil message(it's a wonder Bill hasn't been hunted down and used as a human shield - but I digress).
It says, and I've never seen this one before:

stop: c0000218 registry file failure

The registry cannot load hive(file):
system root\system32\software or its log or alternative.
It is corrupt, absent or not writeable.

I am totally screwed here as I have backed up my data drive, but the audio data (Sonar) is useless without the main project files residing on the C: drive.
I'm thinking of pulling the C: drive out of the machine, slaving it on my wife's just to get the files I need and reformat the HD.

There's gotta be a better way. Boot disk maybe?:confused: :mad: :mad: It's Win2K, which I thought I liked.
 
Thats pretty much what you've gotta do... Remove the HD stick it in another computer remove what you want, the reformat...


sounds like a corrupted boot file or something...
 
What about safe mode ? (Hit F8 on rigth after passing BIOS start up)...
 
Same thing happened to my friends computer. I figured out the system file that was corrupted, or missing, got that file on a disk from my own old computer which had the same OS, and then tried to copy it over from a Safemode dos prompt. Unfortunatly it had no effect. He's got an old POS, so i think the ram was writing bad sectors and corrupted some system files. I just put his drive in my computer as a slave, backed it up, and then formated it.

I was gonna try and boot it from my computer and work on it, but realized that wouldn't work due to hardware/softwear differences.
 
Sounds like a corrupted registry. I think you are following the right idea, put the drive in another system and save the data.

Another example why you should frequently Ghost or backup your system drive...
 
Have you tried reinstalling?
There's an option to repair. It leaves your data and installations intact. And you can choose what things you want to be checked.

Good luck
 
I'd still back up before repairing.
But yes i forgot that. I also tried reinstalling his OS overtop of the old install. I think it's called repairing. Can rewrite all the system files and possibly fix it. With his computer i couldn't do it because it was his sysmem file or something like that.
 
I'd still back up before repairing.
But yes i forgot that. I also tried reinstalling his OS overtop of the old install. I think it's called repairing. Can rewrite all the system files and possibly fix it. With his computer i couldn't do it because it was his sysmem file or something like that.
 
I dont think putting the drive into another machine is going to work. It will still be loading the same copy of the registry. Win Win98 there is a utility that allows you to restore a previous copy of the registry but I think its limited to like the day before. Did you install any new software or hardware before this happened?


Jake
 
Pacifica604w said:
I dont think putting the drive into another machine is going to work. It will still be loading the same copy of the registry. Win Win98 there is a utility that allows you to restore a previous copy of the registry but I think its limited to like the day before. Did you install any new software or hardware before this happened?


Jake
Click to expand...

We aren't talking about booting the OS from another machine, just plugging it in as a slave, and copying the files after booting from another working drive, that will work for sure. But yea it won't actually boot in another machine using the messed up one as the primary drive. And i think the tool your talking about is just reinstalling over the old install, what we talked about before. You just put the disk in and do the same things you'd do for installing the OS, but it will tell you the OS is already installed, and ask what you want to do, format, repair, etc...
 
ambi said:
We aren't talking about booting the OS from another machine, just plugging it in as a slave, and copying the files after booting from another working drive, that will work for sure. But yea it won't actually boot in another machine using the messed up one as the primary drive. And i think the tool your talking about is just reinstalling over the old install, what we talked about before. You just put the disk in and do the same things you'd do for installing the OS, but it will tell you the OS is already installed, and ask what you want to do, format, repair, etc...
Click to expand...

Ok then yes. Putting the drive into another machine to extract data from the bad drive will work. There is another way to fix the registry error. You dont have to re-install the OS every time you get a registry error. I'm looking into that application for registry back up right now. Will post when I find anything.
 
Thanks, everybody. Here's a link describing repair of my exact problem...
http://www.onlineinstitute.com/windowsxp/messages/617.html

It took me about a half hour and lots of hassle just to get to the point where I could get into the Recovery Console. I needed to go into the bios and tell it I wanted to boot from my CD drive instead of the floppy. Once I started up the machine, I got a few screens with options for recovery.

So I get there and it asks me for my administrative password. This machine is for my personal use, my DAW. No need for a password so I never set one. When you don't enter a password, Windows will not accept it. As a result I am dead in the water here. About 16 lines of DOS would have gotten me back up, but no love here.

Next, I removed what I thought was my C: drive from the machine and tried to do a data dump onto the wife's PC, and I couldn't get anywhere with it. Turns out it was my audio data drive. Lucky for me, in an unprecedented move, I backed up the whole thing Monday. I did have a session after that, so I'm hoping that's all I lost.

When I did slave my C: drive to the wife's machine, I could read it. I'm backing up as I write this.

I've had some weird problems leading up to this, which promped me to do the backup in the first place. Seemingly unrelated stuff. First the two year-old power supply choked. Then, my audio played back with pops and crackles for three days and Disk Warning errors showed up in Sonar. These problems mysteriously went away and then the latest problem happened.

My motherboard (Abit BE6II) is the same one that has crapped out in two of my friends' PC's and at least one other BBS member. I think mine may be on its last legs, too.
 
ChuckU said:
So I get there and it asks me for my administrative password. This machine is for my personal use, my DAW. No need for a password so I never set one. When you don't enter a password, Windows will not accept it. As a result I am dead in the water here.
Click to expand...


If you never set a password you only had to enter your username or use administrator as username.

BTW. It never asked me for a password while repairing. I think you changed something in your security options.
 
I just reassembled everything and that didn't work. But thanks for wasting another half hour of my day.
 
ChuckU said:
I just reassembled everything and that didn't work. But thanks for wasting another half hour of my day.
Click to expand...

WOW
Sorry for trying to be helpfull
 
Sorry. I'm just frustrated. Thanks for trying.
I'm blaming myself for everything right now, so comments like "I think you changed something in your security options.:" just gave me another thing to beat on myself with. I know you didn't mean anything by it.

The other nail in the coffin is that my audio drive seems unreadable now. Luckily I backed it up entirely on Monday, but Tuesday night's session was for a paying customer and I may have lost that. Not really a whole lot of audio, but admitting technical problems is probably bad for business.

Today I'm buying a new system (I have to) and I'm lucky if all I've earned on the project will cover it.
 
I dont understand why your audio data and your project data are on seperate drives,or why you back up one and not the other.I use n-track,and all I do is create a folder for my song when I start it and save everything (wav.and project)to that folder.I keep this data on a drive other than my OS drive.Thatway if my C drive crashes or needs reformatting,my music data on my E drive is unaffected.And of course,backing up to CDR is good!
I know this doesn't help with your current problem,but maybe for future reference,you might want to think of audio and project data as one.
 
Good question. I don't have a good answer for that, except that that's gonna change;)

Some good news: the local clone shop took a look at my audio drive and it appears all data is intact. I just need to go get my latest files.

The reason I didn't have a decent backup strategy is that some of my bundle files were over 700mb and I only have a CD burner. Also Sonar only has one mammoth folder for ALL audio files, making it impossible to differentiate which wav files belonged to which project. I upgraded to Sonar 2 just for the feature that all projects are given their own folder. So even if a given project exceeded 700mb, I could back it to 2 CD's and know I'm getting the files I need.

The whole backup strategy was going to come together in a couple of weeks anyway as I was going to install Sonar 2, get a DVD burner and possibly another HD that I could mirror. This has accelerated the process.
 
WAIT

Remember I'm just trying to help you out!
Been there where you're now.

If you reboot with the CDRom don't choose repair in the first options. Go to reinstall, don't worry you have to verify things before it proceeds, there you have another repair option. Try this one. I can't try it myself right now just because it'll be silly doing it on a good system. But I do remember if you choose the first repair option it'l only work with repair disks.

Good luck
 
You're right about all those options, but I don't have the repair disks and it wouldn't let me reinstall. You really do sound like you've been there.

On the bright side, despite the C: drive having the registry error, all my files on that disk are intact. I have another HD that I will copy everything to in case I need it later. Then I'll reformat the current C: and stick it back in the machine on top of a new mobo (I really think it's on its way out because of some of the other probs I've had lately and the history of the model in general.).

I found the audio disk to be in great shape as I now have it running my latest Sonar session on my wife's PC. This took a bit because it wasn't being recognized on startup until I went into the bios and selected "user" instead of "auto." I have no idea what I did, but it worked. I've verified that nothing has been lost. Phew!

My plan is to get the system back up with the new mobo, then put it in a closet and use it as a spare. Then I think I'll get a new 2.4 Ghz system with a DVD burner!!!

I still have a lot of work to do, but I'm no longer totally hosed. Thanks again. What a difference 12 hours makes.
 
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