This morning, my office PC was suddenly showing the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. After 2-3 hours of tinkering, we got it back up and what I can say is that
Vista is weird (We're using Windows Vista Business (64-bit) with SP1 installed).
The BSOD
So what was my problem? It went something like this:
The registry cannot load the (hive) file: SystemRoot/System32/config/SOFTWARE or its log or alternate. It is corrupt, absent, or not writeable.
Beginning dump of physical memory. Physical memory dump complete.
Contact your system administrator or technical support group for further assistance.
or this
Stop: c0000218 {Registry File Failure} The registry cannot load the hive (file): \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE or its log or alternate
Can't remember exactly but basically it was about the hive file and that my registry was most probably dead.
The Solution?!?
My first instinct told me to restart in safe mode but that just proved to be worthless.
So what did we do that worked
- Boot the Windows Vista CD
- Selected the option to Repair an existing installation (it's found in the second window when it finally loads)
- Wait for it....and then done!
- Restart and Vista should load!
Yay! It now boots Windows Vista! It was able to detect that I had problems booting up Windows Vista and fixed the problem itself. It's as easy as cake...if my problem ended there! (
The cake is a lie!)
When logging into the network, my user name and password was not being accepted! The network administrator account can't log in either using my PC. WTH, right?
Now this is where Vista gets weird...
Jack Out To Jack In: Logging Into a Network that Doesn't Exist
Yes, you read that right. Well, it exists but the computer wasn't physically connected. Did you get that? There were
no network cables that connected me to the network but I was able to log in.
This was the only way both my account & the administrator accounts can connect to the "network." It defies all logic that would lead to a proper solution but hey, it works. I had to somehow log in to the computer I'm not really complaining. It's just weird. think it uses previously log-ins to check the information if the log-in information is valid.
At this moment, everything seems to work fine. I can work on my local files and am connected to both the local network and the internet. The only problem is that whenever I have to authenticate/verify an action (Thanks to Vista, this is very common) I have to unplug my network cable and authenticate using the right user name & password.
It's downright annoying to work under that condition so something had to be done.
Welcome back!
So how was I finally able to connect to the network and log in properly? It's quite easy. Get the computer out of the domain and then get back in. After that, I was able to log into the network.
- Go to Computer > Properties > Advanced System Settings
- Click the Computer Name tab
- Then somewhere near the bottom, click the Change button
- In the "Member of" portion at the bottom, select the Workgroup radio button and type in a Workgroup name ("WORKGROUP" by default)
- You'll be asked to restart so just do that
- Repeat the same steps 1-3
- Instead of selecting the Workgroup radio button, select Domain and type in the network domain.
- Restart the computer.
After this, I could log on normally WHILE connected to the network!
(Well, sometime later, something went wrong in the local network so. Woohoo x.x Glad everything's back to normal again. At least it seems so.)
