blue screen of death - Vista

[legrandefromage]

Am enjoying a blue screen failure today - c000021a

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... 5db35bca5b

Now, this goes beyond my talents as even with a recovery disk, I cannot get past any boot pages.

'start from last known good configuration' results in bluescreen

rebooting with a Vista disk - bluescreen

I get to 'windows is loading files' - then it reboots to the windows boot manager screen

Removing bios battery got me somewhere for a short while but I cant even get it to start in safe mode now.

HDD can be read in my main Vista machine so I dont think its that.

F8 wont even bring up any start menus, the F10 HP recovery doesnt work either.

Physical stuff I can repair, the ethereal world of software is just not my thing.

After about 50 restarts, is it time to give up?

 

[highlandsflyer]

Can you boot the drive in the other machine?

If there is data on it you need I would back it up just in case.

You could ghost the drive with Norton Ghost or similar and try repairing the ghost installation.

 

[Raging_Bulls]

Bluescreens are usually the result of a corrupt system file or hardware problem. From what I read in your first post, a system corruption is the most likely culprit.

I'd suggest backing up the hard disk via another computer, formatting it and re-installing Vista.

If even a fresh install doesn't help, it's a hardware problem. In that case I'd suggest getting in touch with a technician.
If the PC is relatively new and the broken part isn't too expensive to replace, a repair would make sense.

 

[Neil]

Not that I've played much with Vista or 7 - but can't you try a repair install?

 

[legrandefromage]

Not that I've played much with Vista or 7 - but can't you try a repair install?

...even with a recovery disk, I cannot get past any boot pages.

 

[Neil]

Not that I've played much with Vista or 7 - but can't you try a repair install?

...even with a recovery disk, I cannot get past any boot pages.

So you couldn't do a reinstall with the installation CD / DVD then?

If not - things are very wrong.

 

[stewlewis]

21a is usually a corrupt file on the drive, sometimes a chkdsk can fix it.
More then likely it's a corrupt registry file, located in c:\windows\system32\config

Registry files. SOFTWARE, SECURITY DEFAULT etc.

If you can access the drive in another PC, or a caddy on the back of another PC you may get away with renaming, eg:

SOFTWARE to SOFTWARE.old and copying SOFTWARE.bak (if available) as SOFTWARE. etc, for each of the registry hives.

Trouble you have here is if you've made system changes between registry file backups, no logins, installed software not working......

I usually take this opportunity to copy my data of and do a reinstall.

 

[Neil]

21a is usually a corrupt file on the drive, sometimes a chkdsk can fix it.
More then likely it's a corrupt registry file, located in c:\windows\system32\config

Registry files. SOFTWARE, SECURITY DEFAULT etc.

If you can access the drive in another PC, or a caddy on the back of another PC you may get away with renaming, eg:

SOFTWARE to SOFTWARE.old and copying SOFTWARE.bak (if available) as SOFTWARE. etc, for each of the registry hives.

Trouble you have here is if you've made system changes between registry file backups, no logins, installed software not working......

I usually take this opportunity to copy my data of and do a reinstall.

Thing is, if one of the registry hives / files is corrupt - and you can recover the filesystem using the drive on a new machine using chkdsk - you're probably still going to have to do a repair install / or some sort of recovery auction to put things in a usable state to boot.

 

[Easy_Rider]

Disconnect the HDD and try getting into BIOS. If this works then it's your HDD at fault, I would then do as others have suggested.

 

[highlandsflyer]

Is it a lappy?

Depending on the maker, there may be a recovery partition on there. Either way I would grab all the data before continuing.

Check yer ram.