T42 crash

[ranchmom5]

My dd's T42 crashed....I guess. Never had to face this before.

This is what happens.
-Turn computer on the IBM screen shows >
-black screen that says "We apologize for the inconvenience but W did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change may have caused this. If your computer stopped respoding, restarted unexpectedly or was automatically shut down to protect your files and folders, choose Last Known Good Configuration to revert to the most recent settings that worked.
If a previous startup attempt was interrupted due to a power failure or because the Power or reset button was pressed, or if you aren't sure what caused the problem, choose Start Windows Normally.

Safe mode
Safe Mode with Networking
Safe Mode with Command Prompt
Start Windows Normally

-count down
-Windows XP start screen
-blue box in middle that says: c0000218 unknown hard error

Then it all repeats
**If I choose anything other than Start Windows normally, it runs a list all ending with System 32.....
Then jumps to a blue box that says something about not loading it to prevent damage...but it leaves so fast that I can't read the entire thing.

after 3 rotations of this, it comes up with "loading boot menu" and a little gray box "Boot Menu" loads, giving the options:
2. Legacy Floppy Drives
3: Atapi CDO:.....DVD Drive
5: IDE HDDO
6: PCI LAN
<Enter Setup>

Okay...so now what do I need to do???

Thanks,
Sharon

[ajkula66]

Given the error, I'll assume that the hard drive is going bad...

Download and burn a copy of PC-Doctor for DOS and boot the machine from it, then run all the HD tests:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-56222

Good luck.

[Mike Blake]

It could well be a failing hard disk, but there's also a
Microsoft KB article worth seeing for other possibilities
(it does indeed include the drive as one of them):

"How to Troubleshoot a Stop 0xC0000218 Error"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314874/it

It starts:

A Stop 0xc0000218 error message means that a necessary registry hive file could not be loaded. This error message can occur if the file is corrupt or missing. To resolve this issue, you can reinstall the operating system and restore the registry files from a backup. The registry files may have been corrupted because of hard disk corruption or some other hardware problem.

This error message can also occur if the driver has corrupted the registry data while loading into memory, or the memory where the registry is loading has a parity error. In the latter case, turn off the external cache and check the memory chips.

...And goes on from there...

Now, you may notice that's from the Italian MS site, though in
English. The US MS site has one for earlier versions of Windows,
and another that bundles together a number of errors. That one
is at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822705/en-us and called
Registry troubleshooting steps for advanced users

[jamerslong]

Try reseating the drive and ram a couple of times.

if it still recognizes the HDD in bios (option 5), choose the HDD and see if it boots.

If it says non system/bootable disc/media error, your drive may well be trashed,

otherwise attempt to install an OS on it. Linux is a great thing to try using, you can move empty space around and not ruin your OS installation.
Or if you have a Genuine XP CD youc and try running a repair installation and see what happens.

[killer]

Does pressing the blue 'Access IBM' button allow you to use Rescue & Recovery to restore your system to the last backup you made?

If you haven't made a backup then it might still allow you to recover system files to an earlier date. Failing that, it might allow you to do a restore to factory settings ... but you'd lose all of your personal data.

Good luck.

[ranchmom5]

Well my TP friends, the T42 is back up and running! I am not exactly sure what did it, but I am very happy...as is my dd!

I did the re-seating of RAM and HDD as suggested, but it didn't appear to help - the same screens came up when I attempted a boot up.

Another dear TP friend,who had emailed me privately sent a link to an article on how to start in Safe Mode. So I tried that and it worked! At least for now.

Thanks SO much for all the suggestions. You all are the BEST!

Blessings,
Sharon

[RealBlackStuff]

Now that you have it all working again, it's time to make a backup strategy.
Acronis TrueImage comes to mind, to take a full image onto e.g. an external USB hard disk.

[sktn77a]

Could be a corrupted system file or, worse, a hard disk drive going bad - you could be living on borrowed time! I'd make backup copies of all your data files. Then, if it gets worse, you can try a clean factory restore or, if necessary, a new drive.

[ranchmom5]

dd doesn't have that many important files, but she was in tears over a paper she had half written last night. We have since moved that and some others to a flash drive and she synced her ipod.

So this is what I have done this afternoon.
-ran ccleaner incl. the registry cleaner

-ran AVG and it found 15 Trojans and other such things! It also seems to have been affected as it runs only about 30 sec and then comes up saying it has to be shut down. It does actually keep going and did a complete scan, but there must be some corruption there.

-downloaded SuperAntiSpyware after reading on Gizmo's site that it was the best of the best....BUT it will not run. Well, it starts scanning but then when it gets about 350 registry entries scans, the computer goes to a restart. It doesn't matter if I do a quick or full scan, same thing happens.

Have considered doing a system restore but haven't yet.

Any thoughts or ideas?

[ranchmom5]

An update: I think I may have gotten it fixed??? After my last post, I downloaded and ran Malawarebytes. It found a huge amount of things - trojans, adware, etc and even triggered some false response from AVG. Got rid of those and ran SuperAntiSpyware again and this time it was able to run without triggering a reboot. It found another 9 items. My dd really doesn't get online much, but early this week she went to some game sites - online checkers was one - and I think that must have been where all this junk came from.

As of right now, everything seems to be back to normal. I tried AVG again and it is now working fine. No strange reboots randomly occurring and no strange screens popping up.

Again, many thanks to all of you who offered advice and wisdom. I will be forever grateful for stumbling upon this site a year or so ago.

Blessings,
Sharon

[killer]

Sharon, I am pleased to read that you have fixed the problem.

You say you use AVG. My wife has AVG on her PC and gets a lot of problems with their updates. I uninstalled AVG and now use Avira Antivir. It seems much better at spotting malware than AVG was.

[virge]

It seems much better at spotting malware than AVG was.

I'll second that statement about AVG. I switched from it to Avira as well because it seemed much better at detection. I'm also using Avast (on different computers of course). Since shifting from AVG I've learned not to keep all my antiviruses in one basket so to speak.