HCHTech
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 4,157
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
This is a week old Dell desktop setup with a local user account by the customer. I went there about 3 days ago to install a printer and transfer data from the old box. Everything working fine at that point. Customer refused offer to make a recovery drive, but I did create a system restore point after the work was done.
He calls yesterday, computer won't start after he "tried to download a game". Sigh.
It's on my bench now, and since I haven't seen that many truly scrambled Win8 installations, I've spent some extra time with it, just trying to figure out what happened. Before I proceed with a N&P, I thought I'd post here to see if I missed anything.
On boot, the computer launches into the "Preparing Automatic Repair" routine, followed by "Diagnosing your PC". Then the "Your computer did not start correctly" screen. None of the advanced options will run, you get a screen stating that "you need to sign in as an administrator but there aren't any administrator accounts on this PC" message. The only choice left is to shut down or restart, and the whole thing repeats.
I cloned the disk, then ran full hardware diagnostics, just to be sure - everything passes.
A full scan with Kaspersky Rescue Disk is clean.
Booting from a Windows DVD, I can get into advanced options, but can make no progress. e.g. choosing Safe Mode just reboots, goes into system repair, system diagnostics & the same "Your computer did not start correctly".
Manually enabling the administrator account completes successfully, but doesn't change the symptoms.
There are no restore points available.
From command prompt, I browse to the System Volume Information directory and see that there are indeed no restore points.
the Win\Sys32\config\backup directory has entries for each registry hive, but they all have zero byte sizes.
The hives in Win\Sys32\config all have normal-appearing file sizes.
The srtlog file shows one error, Registry Rollback failed, error 0x2, Registry is corrupt. Well, duh.
bootrec /rebuild results in "No Windows Installations found"
bootrec /fixboot & /fixmbr complete successfully, but don't change the symptoms.
sfc /scannow results in "There is a system repair pending which requires a reboot to complete". The trick of specifying the location with
sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows
results in "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation".
I checked in the winsxs directory, there is no pending.xml file. There is a "migration.xml" file, which contains the single word "CORRUPT".
Running a system refresh causes an immediate reboot and the same symptoms.
So - I'm barring other suggestions, I'm calling this "Well and truly horked".
He calls yesterday, computer won't start after he "tried to download a game". Sigh.
It's on my bench now, and since I haven't seen that many truly scrambled Win8 installations, I've spent some extra time with it, just trying to figure out what happened. Before I proceed with a N&P, I thought I'd post here to see if I missed anything.
On boot, the computer launches into the "Preparing Automatic Repair" routine, followed by "Diagnosing your PC". Then the "Your computer did not start correctly" screen. None of the advanced options will run, you get a screen stating that "you need to sign in as an administrator but there aren't any administrator accounts on this PC" message. The only choice left is to shut down or restart, and the whole thing repeats.
I cloned the disk, then ran full hardware diagnostics, just to be sure - everything passes.
A full scan with Kaspersky Rescue Disk is clean.
Booting from a Windows DVD, I can get into advanced options, but can make no progress. e.g. choosing Safe Mode just reboots, goes into system repair, system diagnostics & the same "Your computer did not start correctly".
Manually enabling the administrator account completes successfully, but doesn't change the symptoms.
There are no restore points available.
From command prompt, I browse to the System Volume Information directory and see that there are indeed no restore points.
the Win\Sys32\config\backup directory has entries for each registry hive, but they all have zero byte sizes.
The hives in Win\Sys32\config all have normal-appearing file sizes.
The srtlog file shows one error, Registry Rollback failed, error 0x2, Registry is corrupt. Well, duh.
bootrec /rebuild results in "No Windows Installations found"
bootrec /fixboot & /fixmbr complete successfully, but don't change the symptoms.
sfc /scannow results in "There is a system repair pending which requires a reboot to complete". The trick of specifying the location with
sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows
results in "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation".
I checked in the winsxs directory, there is no pending.xml file. There is a "migration.xml" file, which contains the single word "CORRUPT".
Running a system refresh causes an immediate reboot and the same symptoms.
So - I'm barring other suggestions, I'm calling this "Well and truly horked".
)
