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 alternateCan'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!
- 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.