Woke up, saw the system rebooting, then trying to load windows, then rebooting..

Here is what happened:

The RAM died somehow (lovely, huh?) probably from the lightning a week or so ago, and it corrupted the REGISTRY on this Windows 2000 system.

I would boot up, and get this error:

THE REGISTRY CANNOT LOAD HIVE (FILE) \SYSTEMROOT \SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE OR ITS LOG OR ALTERNATE IT IS CORRUPT, ABSENT, OR NOT WRITABLE

Went to Microsofts site technet, and they said it can happen if the parity of your ram is bad or some such thing. PULLED the ram, called a friend that has the same ram for this type of MB (PC2700 I think) and it boots to the reg, and STILL can't get in. So I load up the Win2000 recovery cd and disks, drop to console since it cannot REPAIR it--saying it can't even find a windows install, so I go to the console, and copy the repair backup reg hives to the OS\system32\config and overwrite them. FIXED. Boots with new ram. Ram tests DID find errors in FREAKING BOTH DAMN CHIPS!!!!!!!!!!!!! This ()^&*(#^ lighting strike has taken out 1 output of my Soundblaster Audigy1 card, blew a fan, and killed my slave drive on MY personal PC. AND NOW THIS?!

Anyway, loading up windows was like a fresh install, since all registry setting are back to default, I had to fix the security, the icons, the MMC for the desktop and loads of other things--reupdate with patches and such. a total of 8 hours of dicking with it.

I was like... Well, I lost it. I came VERY close to saying 'f-this'. but I took a break and chilled. [img]smile.gif[/img]

I personally hope lighting dies. I WILL KILL any air elementals in NWN tonight. I OWE THEM! :D

Anyway, we now need some freaking RAM. I have no clue how much it costs, but this was Kensington Ram--VERY nice fast ram. (cries). So if you can help out, donate or something. :( I'll go see who has it the cheapest. I gotta give the ram that is currently IN the server back in a few days or a week though.

See how GREAT Florida is?!!


-----------------

Updated When we went down after that BRIEF uptime:

Ok, so I do a checkdisk, and scan of the hard drive after I get everything running again. It comes up with HUNDREDS of bad clusters. I clean the errors and reboot, then get this damn error at bootup again:

THE REGISTRY CANNOT LOAD HIVE (FILE) \SYSTEMROOT \SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE OR ITS LOG OR ALTERNATE IT IS CORRUPT, ABSENT, OR NOT WRITABLE

Then 'CANNOT FIND OS'. It was THERE, just that the bad clusters were right on the registry entries I guess. nice, huh? I think some PM's got messed up. I got one from someone, but when I clicked on it, it said it wasn't for ME!? I fixed that though.. ANYWAY, on with the story......

THIS IS THE HARD DRIVE I JUST REPLACED IN APRIL! (So, knowing RMA (returning it for a replacement since it's under warranty) I went out, and used out NEVER USED 'emergency credit card'--it is supposed to only be for home needs, but this was needed. So THIS TIME, I bought a better Hard Drive, a Seagate Barracuda 80GB with 8MB Cache. I'll NEVER buy Western Digital ever again. That's 3-4 drives that failed in the last 2 years.

Anyway. ALONG with that Hard Drive, I bought the APX Surge protector and it has a UPS built in (17 Mins). And it's the surge protector that guarantees up to $50,000 that if your PC gets fried, they will cover the costs. So NEVER AGAIN will Lightning be a worry for Ironworks. NEVER!

Anyway, We STILL Need 2 sticks of ram, so if you can donate some, I would appreciate it GREATLY!

The thing that doubly sucked was that my Wives Sister is getting married this weekend, and for the past few days, We've been mostly out of the house getting ready for it, and I didn't have time to get it up as quickly as I wanted, and it pissed me off SO bad.. :( But, it's cool now. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Anyway, I had to do a fresh install of 2000, config everything and re-install everything. You may get an SMTP error until I get our Email server recovered and up. ugh.


Anyway, had a GRAND weekend, how was yours? :D

[ 09-02-2003, 05:50 AM: Message edited by: Ziroc ]

Well good to see everything got back up, I'll try and send some money your way if I can Ziroc.

Great job Z¨! And other membes who send money to him!

Hurrrraaaaayyy!!!
[img]graemlins/thewave.gif[/img]

As a 'Ironworksaholic' my hands were beginning to shake and my legs were trembling, but now I am fine again [img]smile.gif[/img]

[img]graemlins/greenbounce.gif[/img]
Insane

Yuhuuuuuu [img]graemlins/thewave.gif[/img]
God I missed this place.

to Ziroc: Great job getting back up so fast again (although I think I already had withdrawal symptoms kicking in this morning). I'm not familiar with your tech situation and probably only pointing out the obivous but: My (sucky IBM) hard drives tend to malfunction too shutting me out of windows so I have windows installed on my slave-drive too (along with a LOT of recovery programs). When my master goes down I only change the jumpers, boot up from slave and run chkdsk/Partition magic/Norton System Works/... (whichever I need to fix that damn thing). It may not work in case of physical damage but at least it gets me back up because I just HATE being completely shut down.
Sorry again if this seems presumptous and doesn't contrivbute to your needs ;)

Looks like i had more fun over the weekend than you did dude. :D

Anyway, good to see IW back up. ;)

Good that were back up. Exactly what happend with the lightning? Did it strike your house? I'm starting to fear for my own system now lol.

Wow, I think most of us could echo Johnny! We had far better weekends than you did, Z! What a pain all that was! So glad you DID get out for the wedding, though. A little fresh air probably kept you from tossing the server in the nearest lake! [img]graemlins/laugh2.gif[/img]

Glad to see my beloved Ironworks back! Thanks, Z!!!!

Great to see the site up again. Nice job Ziroc. hmmm.. didn't realise lightning can cause that. perhaps I need to buy an powersurge myself.

Not the harddrive again. I'm glad you managed to sort things out. I've seen some of those error messages myself sometimes, especially the 'cannot find OS'. A checkdisk usually clears that up but it's still the first sign of the apocalypse. ;)

I hope you didn't spend all weekend trying to fix this. :( I hope you had some free time to enjoy your weekend and labour day.