Every once in a while I will come across a computer that will not boot up but instead stops at a black screen of death (as opposed to a blue screen of death) that looks something like this:
This happens to show the system hive of the registry as being missing or corrupt, you might also see the same thing only with “software” replacing “system”.
Either one is bad news.
Microsoft’s answer is to boot with your XP CD and try a repair. What the repair process will hope to find is backups of these critical Windows registry files in %WINDIR%\Repair (Probably C:\Windows\Repair, but maybe C:\WINNT\Repair if XP was an upgrade from Windows 2000).
But as I show in the video down below, those files may not have been updated since Windows XP was installed – maybe a long time ago. If that is the case, you might as well plan on a complete Windows Reinstall, along with reinstalling all of your software programs and any special device drivers.
The solution is to be prepared with current, updated repair files. How, you ask?
Easy, watch this short video showing how you can make a system state backup that will update these repair files and even schedule that backup to occur automatically, say, once per week so that a repair can be quick and successful should this little tragedy ever befall your computer.
How and Why to Make a System State Backup
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Interesting.
Sounds like what I was thinking when I was trying to get a disk formatted on an older XP machine.
Thanks for posting.
Backing up your computer is a must today. So many people don’t even think about it. It’s worth it when you need it most. Great article!
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