STOP: c0000218. Anyone know what the solution might be?

[darrinps]

Well it looks like a lot of 2000 users have gotten this but I couldn't find anything on it in the XP foum so I'm posting now.

Does anyone know what might be wrong and how to correct it?

I have a home built Abit BF6 motherboard with a Pentium II 400, a Powercolor TNT-2 M64 based video card, an Ensoniq PCI sound card, Maxtor 8 gig hard drive and a Teac CD-ROM.

I called Microsoft to help me out but NO GO (they seemed clueless as their suggestions didn't even BEGIN to make sense let alone work).

 

[Newton]

In NT that code is refereing to a SCSI controller problem, with using legacy equipment like your config, I would double check MS's Hardware compadability list.

If your board or controller isnt on the HCL go to the manufacturer and see if they have any XP updated firmware or BIOS updates.

XP is very good but IMHO the HCL is pretty narrow and only has newer configs on it.

Hope this helps, I hope someone else can give you a magic bullet solution, but I doubts there is one

 

[followthebits]

Well, I just purchased a WinXP computer using a 1.4 Gig AMD XP chip on an ASUS motherboard with 256Mram and a 40Gig disk.
I'm getting the
--------------------------------
STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The Registry cannot load the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE
or its lor or alternate
It is corrupt, absent or not writeable
------------------------------------
error consistently now. I went to MS Support site and could not find this issue listed under WinXP issues. I've been looking through the Win2000 postings and seen several differnet threads. Seems to be a focus on the idea of the computer shutting down so fast that cached data is not completly synced at shutdown causing data lost and corruption in the registry.

Has anyone in WinXP land solved this problem yet?
Thanks
Curtis

 

[followthebits]

I found what I think is a solution in the Win200 thread. I've copied my note to that group below. If you go to the thread and look for the reference posts the details of the register fix are laid out.
thread616-86626 to the posts garywang and asdd posted, I no longer am getting the C0000218 error message in Windows XP at boot up. I went into the registry and changed the "ClearPageFileAtShutdown" from "0" to "1". So far this has worked to get rid of the error. I've spent the day off and on rebooting the computer as I reloaded all the software. When I rebooted I made a point of doing a complete SHUTDOWN. No more "STOP: c0000218" errors. I've rebooted at least 12-15 times today with no problems. So I'm pretty hopefull that this is fixed.
I think this solution is similiar to feckman's solution of turning off the disk caching in that it assures that the internal caches are written back to disk before shutdown. It may be that doing a ClearPageFileAtShutdown causes enough of a delay that the cache has enough additional time to flush before power off.
What I find interesting is that this is even an option. I would have thought that "ClearPageFileAtShutdown" would be mandatory. Oh Well. So far it seems to work for me.
Curtis

 

[Disgruntled]

I have similar problems on XP.
THe W2k forum provides most of thetheories but so far no definitive answer.
I do not think it is a harware compatibility issue as suggested.

So far the Page flush trick has worked for me.
I cannot turn of Caching as my integrate Promis RAID denies this option.

The down side of page flush is very long shutdown times.

It's all a bit like the old "Its now safe to turn off your computer" message with early Windows