Major error after hard disk crash

[dzon]

Hi,

I have 2003 enterprise server on hardware raid 5. Yesderday we had a power outage which took down my server. I rebooted it only to find that one of the four drives had failed. I also get the following error or words similar:

Stop: {Registry File Failure} Registry cannot load the hive (file): \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE. It is corrupt, absent, or not writeable.

I have replaced the drive and performed a rebuild and now the drive is healthy, however the above error is still persistant.

I have pressed F8 and chosen 'last good config' but to no avail.

I was now thinking of booting to recovery console to rename the current software file to .bak and copying the software file from the repair folder to the config folder. Will this work?
Are there any other solutions?
will it interfere with my SQL set-up?
I have shadow copy turned on, will this help?

Thanks in advance

Dzon

 

[captaincrunch00]

I dont want to alarm you as I've never seen this error on a server before, but hoooooly crap this is the worst error to see on a workstation.

There are a few things you can try, but essentially the registry is gone. If you import the old software.bak file you're going to have a plain jane 2003 install version of the registry.
Chances are no programs are going to work.

Here is a microsoft article about it.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=822705

And another one for XP:

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_sys32.htm

Now would be a great time to test your recovery steps, you'll have to restore the System State at the very least I think.

You may want to wait for someone else to post but I've never seen anything good come out of this error.

 

[dzon]

HI,

Thanks for your reply.
I went ahead and used recovery console to copy the software file from the repair folder. This at least got me back into windows. My SQL server did not work but quite a lot of other things were working. However I got the feeling that it was not very stable. at this point i wished 2003 server had the system restore thing so i could have restored it to an earlier point. I was hoping to use shadow copy but that appeared to have lost all data.

The good thing was that I was able to copy all data files/folders, config files, etc to another server. I then formatted the drive and installed again. Everything is now working, i have created an emergeny disk and go a UPS!

what a day LOL

Dzon

 

[karmic]

do you by chance have a copy of system state on tape or a backup somewhere??? if so, restore the whole thing.

I had an issue with a terminal server a few weeks ago, t'was attached to a DC and it crashed as well. Someone ran an update and rebooted.

I had to restore the whole system state from tape to a directory, burn it to cd and import it to the server.

Worked like a charm.

~ K.I.S.S - Don't make it any more complex than it has to be ~