Well, it happened to me again, PC crash – my desktop decided it didn’t want to boot Windows (XP Pro SP2) yesterday, so I am posting via laptop while some surgery is going on. As familiar as I have become with the Blue Screen of Death – it threw a new one at me . a BSOD stating BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO. The error name in itself is scary enough. Some internet searching via laptop indicated it could be either bad RAM or corrupted registry. Even the Windows repair tool booting via CD gave me another blue screen! Not good when the Windows Recovery tool doesn’t even work.
Bad RAM – doesn’t look like it – pulled old ram out, put new ram in – same errors. Out $140, but will try to return to Best Buy.
Corrupted Registry – I have a backup that I restored the entire Windows directory from, no luck – same errors
Hmmm, Motherboard bad???? OK, I had a old hard drive with a prior install of Windows on it. Whatayaknow – it boots!! So something is freaky with the current hard drive.
So looks like I am off to restore the entire backup image of the drive that is about a month old, so I will probably lose something along the way. Fortunately I have learned NOT to keep any images on this stupid thing – they are offline. But will likely lose some email, and maybe some image database entries or whatever else I installed in the last month. And I am not even sure if it will work yet. If restoring the drive image doesn’t work, I suppose the whole thing is off to the shop. Two late evenings wasted already with this &*%$^&@ machine. If the new Macs were released now, I would be at the Apple store instead of messing around with this darn thing – and its fate might be similar to below.
.
I used a product called RegCure from http://www.pc-registry-repair.com when I was in a similar situation to you. It seemed to work well.
-Jeff
Mark, I too would like to offer my words of sympathy here. This just is the worst and I know incredibly time consuming this is too. Hopefully you will be able to recover most and soon. An excuse to to dig deep and splash out on a Mac perhaps? I think it can be justified 🙂 that is if you need to justify it too anyone (such as a partner or wife perhaps?). Fingers crossed and all the best from down under!
Thomas
Mark, I’m sorry to hear about your PC troubles. They can, indeed, be temperamental beasts. It’s a good thing that you are disciplined enough to make image backups so that you can get back up and running!
Good luck, my friend!
This is my worst nightmare, I just tried a off line storage free trial with Carbonite have you heard of them? I am also loading to disc as well.
Thanks for sharing the article–that’s way cool! I drool with envy.
You may want to contact WD about the hard drive–it might still be under warranty. You’ll need the serial number, though…
Namaste’ Mark, tsk tsk you were feeding those mogwai after midnight again weren’t you..fess up now ;0) If I have any constructive advice since most of the stuff you said went waaaay over MY simple, yet not so simple brain,:0) it is that gremlins can BITE, oh and multiply so don’t be spilling water either eh? Those be my oh great words of wisdom for the moment.
Man, I feel you pain.
Well,
My drive image did restore (6 hours later), and the computer booted this morning before I had to leave for work. I haven’t figured out exactly what I lost – but hey – it started – baby steps!! Funny thing is that this hard drive is fairly new (1 yr old), and a Western Digital. I think it could have been corruption due to the many crashes and lockups I have had and not able to do ‘proper Windows shutdowns.’
And whatdayaknow – talk about timing;
http://www.macworld.com/article/131461/2008/01/macproupdate.html
My sympathies–been there, done that (too many times.) Being a network administrator, I have to say that I’ve found that 90% of blue screen errors tend to point to a bad hard drive.