Ok so, a few days ago my keyboard broke, out of desperation i 'borrowed' my brothers old sticky one! Anyways, i was working away on photoshop and need to print screen, unluckily for me, this keyboard had a "power" button in the same spot as my old one had "print-screen"! Needless to say i was raging! Lost all my current work and stuff, but it seems that was the least of my worries!
So ill start from the begininning and give you a little run through of the DIY stuff ive attempted.
Just to clarify its a packard bell computer, bout 18 months old, running xp sp2.
Right, when the computer was rebooting i was hit with the black screen "your computer wasnt shut down properly.... blah blah" and i was given the options to safe mode it, run previous settings that worked and normal mode. I just chose the previous settings, it got as far as a blue screen with the following displayed:
STOP: C0000218 {Registry File Failure} The registry cannot load the hive (file):\System Root\System32\Config\SAM or its log or alternate. It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.
Now, im aware thats SAM stands for 'Security Accounts Manager' and is to do with logging on the system.
From here i did some research and found that i was going to need to get into the recovery console and type some neat coding. This took me a while to get to as i dont have an XP cd (wasnt supplied with the computer *shrugs*) and i dont have a floppy drive so i cudnt create disks using a wizard! So i managed to get one from a friend.
I followed the advice directly from microsoft (
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545)
I managed to get as far as part one *facepalm* where it gets you to replace the hive files with proper ones from the repair folder, after creating backups. This is where i hit my next roadblock, when trying to copy from
c:\windows\repair\sam to
c:\windows\system32\config\sam, I was told "the system cannot find the file specified". I think this is something to do with backups right? Im pretty sure ive done these... but i guess i was wrong... Surely they keep good copies on the XP disc?
Anyways, just for good measure i attempted to run the usual sequence of getting on to windows after trying these few tricks, but nothing seemed to change.
But then, i followed some advice from a site that told me to enter something like "ren sam sam.bak" but a few lines later it was asking me to copy from the repair folder again, which is where i stopped once more. Furious i just stopped and rebooted, came back after a quick BIO break to find it had done something to affect the startup! hurray!... or not... It showed my wallpaper in the back ground, a box with the windows xp logo and a comment "Windows xp is starting up..." But there was some error box in the foreground!
It went a little something like this:
Security Accounts Manager initialization failed because of the following error: A device attached to the system is not functioning.
Error Status: 0xc0000001.
Please click OK to shut down this system and reboot into Safe Mode, check event log for more detailed information.
Microsoft has a page for this error too...
(
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316751)
However yet again im asked to do that whole repair thing which of course.. i cant!
Oh and btw, when i reboot in safe mode, it just says the exact same thing... d'oh!
I tried to be as specific and in-depth as possible to my explanation, i know how many problems there are with windows these days! *sighs*
Please, any advice would be so helpful, ive got some work that i need to do before next friday so im pretty desperate!
And just on a side note, i know some things about computers and stuff, but not loads! so any complicated procedures (that may not see so complicated to you :laugh
BTW, i tried a check disk or 2, said there were a few errors, but it wudnt attempt to fix them!
Thanks in advance!
Peter
