I have a used $400 Dell Latitude D505 that I take on travel. (Otherwise it sits in a closet until its battery is dead.) I bought it used with no CDs or documentation or other utilities-- just the laptop.
Yesterday I hauled it out after six weeks, turned it on, and got the message "Battery critically low! Hit F1 to continue". It wouldn't power down on its own so, after hunting around for the power supply a couple minutes, I plugged it in. The laptop seemed to boot through the WinXP screen but the display didn't come up. After a few seconds it went dark (in retrospect probably the screensaver kicking in) so I held the power button down until it shut off.
When I rebooted it complained about not being able to boot the previous time and asked what I wanted to do. I chose the "continue normal boot" option. It went through the same behavior but I could hear the hard drive searching so I let it run on a while longer. Eventually it went blue and coughed up the following DOS text:
>
Stop: c0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SECURITY
or its log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.
Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete.
Contact your system administrator or technical support group for further assistance.
<
Dell's diagnostics gave me the following on the hard drive:
>Test Results : Fail
Error code : 1000-0142
Msg: Unit 4 : Drive Self Test failed. Status byte = 79.<
Booting to Safe Mode (with or without command prompt) shows a screen of drivers loading. It gets to a file "Mup.sys", stops there, and eventually gives me the same blue screen & registry failure message.
Neither the laptop HD or a CD will boot to anything-- safe mode, a command prompt, a previous restore point, anything. Putting in a WinXP CD is supposed to give me access to something called a "Recovery Console" with a prompt to run CHKDSK /R. (I'm familiar with CHKDSK but I've never had to work with a Recovery Console.) I don't have the laptop's original WinXP CD so I used an old WinXP CD that just tries to delete the laptop's OS partition and start over with a new partition & installation.
Apparently when booting anything with WinXP there's no way to avoid going to the registry, and that registry data is probably written on a bad HD sector.
A Google search confirmed all those messages have been seen before and there are plenty of websites that suggest various solutions, but all of them start with a command prompt. My specific problem is getting at the hard drive to get that prompt.
I poked around Dell's website looking for a recovery utility but if one exists, it's very hard to find. At this point I could continue to mess around with deleting the OS partition and reloading WinXP but I don't know if the HD is even working well enough to make it worth the effort.
It's not a crisis. The data is already backed up so I could work through the reinstallation process if the HD is worth the effort. Before I go down that road, is there any other way to get at the HD's command prompt? Anyone know if it's worth copying GRC's "Spinrite" or some other HD utility to a CD to see if that'll load on the laptop at boot? Does anyone have any other suggestions?
Yesterday I hauled it out after six weeks, turned it on, and got the message "Battery critically low! Hit F1 to continue". It wouldn't power down on its own so, after hunting around for the power supply a couple minutes, I plugged it in. The laptop seemed to boot through the WinXP screen but the display didn't come up. After a few seconds it went dark (in retrospect probably the screensaver kicking in) so I held the power button down until it shut off.
When I rebooted it complained about not being able to boot the previous time and asked what I wanted to do. I chose the "continue normal boot" option. It went through the same behavior but I could hear the hard drive searching so I let it run on a while longer. Eventually it went blue and coughed up the following DOS text:
>
Stop: c0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SECURITY
or its log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.
Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete.
Contact your system administrator or technical support group for further assistance.
<
Dell's diagnostics gave me the following on the hard drive:
>Test Results : Fail
Error code : 1000-0142
Msg: Unit 4 : Drive Self Test failed. Status byte = 79.<
Booting to Safe Mode (with or without command prompt) shows a screen of drivers loading. It gets to a file "Mup.sys", stops there, and eventually gives me the same blue screen & registry failure message.
Neither the laptop HD or a CD will boot to anything-- safe mode, a command prompt, a previous restore point, anything. Putting in a WinXP CD is supposed to give me access to something called a "Recovery Console" with a prompt to run CHKDSK /R. (I'm familiar with CHKDSK but I've never had to work with a Recovery Console.) I don't have the laptop's original WinXP CD so I used an old WinXP CD that just tries to delete the laptop's OS partition and start over with a new partition & installation.
Apparently when booting anything with WinXP there's no way to avoid going to the registry, and that registry data is probably written on a bad HD sector.
A Google search confirmed all those messages have been seen before and there are plenty of websites that suggest various solutions, but all of them start with a command prompt. My specific problem is getting at the hard drive to get that prompt.
I poked around Dell's website looking for a recovery utility but if one exists, it's very hard to find. At this point I could continue to mess around with deleting the OS partition and reloading WinXP but I don't know if the HD is even working well enough to make it worth the effort.
It's not a crisis. The data is already backed up so I could work through the reinstallation process if the HD is worth the effort. Before I go down that road, is there any other way to get at the HD's command prompt? Anyone know if it's worth copying GRC's "Spinrite" or some other HD utility to a CD to see if that'll load on the laptop at boot? Does anyone have any other suggestions?
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