I’ve not had much time for programming this past week or so, as I’ve been playing Tech Support for the family. This has involved cycling a couple of 43 mile round trips, the first time to pick up a family member’s laptop so I could try to fix it at my leisure at home (since there was no quick fix), and the second time to pick up an external hard drive onto which I could copy all the important data (if I could retrieve it, that is).
The symptom was the Windows XP Home laptop was stuck in a perpetual reboot sequence. After about 40 seconds or so, the Windows XP loading progress bar would freeze, the screen would go black and the laptop would reboot. Ad infinitum.
So, I pressed F8 during a reboot to get a list of boot options and went through them one at a time.
Boot into Safe Mode (with / without networking): Same problem – rebooted before it even got into Safe Mode.
Boot with debugging: Same problem.
Every other option: Same problem.
One of the options was not to automatically reboot on a system error, which I chose, and this resulted in a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) which gave this cryptic piece of trivia:
STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000135 (0x00000000 0x00000000).
The system has been shut down.
So, I searched the Internet from my MacBook to see if anyone else had had the same problem, and it seemed that quite a few people had. Great! Well, you know what I mean. So, expecting the solution to appear at any moment, I scrolled down the forum posts… nope, not this one… nor that one… oh, this other person has the same problem… ah, and this guy also has the problem… yes, yes, but what’s the solution?
It seemed that lots of people had the problem, but no one had a definitive remedy!
More searches ensued, and finally some solutions were proposed:
Boot from the Windows XP Home CD, enter the Repair Console and enter chkdsk /r
.
The problem with that is you have to enter the administrator’s password – which no-one knew. I tried admin
, Admin
, password
… three wrong attempts… automatic reboot. Tried a few more… automatic reboot. Did some searches online for a default password… eventually tried just pressing the enter key… and it took me to the console! (Incidentally, I did try that about half an hour before, but I didn’t realise that this console I was seeking was just the DOS prompt! It didn’t help that a message a few lines up read ‘Press enter key to quit’… but it turns out that was left over from a previous choice!)
So, finally at the Repair Console, I tried most of the options, including chkdsk to see if any files were corrupted, but they weren’t. The boot log file ntbtlog.txt was no help. I tried to copy the user data off the hard drive onto a USB thumb drive, only to be greeted with ‘Access denied’ messages.
There was the option of doing a Repair Install, but apparently that just overwrites all your system files with, in my case, Windows XP Home SP1a files which, assuming it fixed the problem, would possibly require Windows to be reactivated and also be updated to SP3 again. The activation code was fortunately stuck on the underside of the laptop, but I figured a repair install would be a second to last resort, with a full install (wiping out all user data) being the last resort…
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