W2K continually reboots (Just before log in) After updates?

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Guest

I have three machines experiencing the same problem - not sure if related to
recent windows updates.

These machines reboot just prior to windows log in.
They cycle endlessly - rebooting.

I think their "system failures" settings are set to reboot on system crash -
so I am not sure if a BSOD is displayed or not. That may give me a clue to
reason for crash.

My first step was to try to amend the "system failure" settings - but as
mentioned I can not boot into safe mode to amend , is there a way to amend
the system failure settings via recovery console?

Or does anyone have any other solutions?

My next step - would be to remove any recently applied updates, again via
recovery console? Is this possible? And would the updates be easily
identified? (As I do not have a list of all updates that were automatically
applied prior to the problem)

Thanks - sorry for multiple questions in one post!! (This is my first post)
 
You can use a Bart's PE disk with a registry editor plugin to change the
auto reboot behaviour.

To uninstall hotfixes from the Recovery Console navigate to the hotfix's
spuninst directory and use the BATCH command to process the uninstall
routine. Example:

cd %systemroot%\$NtUninstallKBnnnnnn$\spuninst

(or simply: cd $NtUninstallKBnnnnnn$\spuninst )

then issue:

batch spuninst.txt

If the batch command fails try:

batch spuninst.bat

John
 
Managed to uninstall the last hotfix - using your suggestions, appears to run
the batch fine.

However does not solve the problem - machine still reboots continually
(incidently the update was KB931768)

Could residual information be retained in registry from this update? causing
the problem?

I followed your suggestion for Barts PE (after locating the registry editor
plugin) - interesting tool, however, I think I have a problem with this as
well!! I believe you can only build from a copy of XP :-

"Why can't Windows 2000/NT4 be used to build BartPE? Is there a reason for
this?

Yes, that kernel does not support the "/minint" switch and therefore cannot
boot from read only media... Also the layout.inf does not contain required
information"

I do have a versions of XP - but they are all Dell OEM (Pre-installed),
after the Barts PE disk is created, (which appears to be succesfull), if I
use on the W2k machine (Non Dell) I get an error relating to IASTOR.sys which
appears to be a dell driver.

Any other way of using a registry editor from recover console or DOS?

Thanks
 
I beleive that the IASTOR is a mass storage/RAID device driver (or a
SATA driver). You can't do registry work from the Recovery Console or
from DOS. You could do it by connecting to the machine over the network
or by mounting the disk in another Windows 2000/XP machine and using the
registry editor's "Load Hive" feature to load the System Hive of the
broken installation. If you do it with a Windows 2000 machine you have
to use Regedt32 to do it.

John
 
OK - so I managed to get Bart PE working on the W2k machine by using another
OEM (I had forgotten about an old IBM laptop) for the Bart PE Build.

When I try to enter the registry editor I get the following error:-

The remote user profile located c:\documents and
settings\administrator.pc46\ntuser.dat could not be loaded

Does this imply this is corrupt?

I now intend to follow your suggestion of mounting on another PC and load
the system hive - but feel I may encounter a similar problem?
 
In my organization we experienced the same problem. Most of our
desktops are wXP but we still have some 15 to 20 machines running on
w2k. We have a policy to automatically install the latest updates as
they became available from Microsoft's website. I am pointing at
yesterday's (may 9 2007) updates as the source of our (now 8 machines)
w2k computers rebooting right before getting to the login screen. Any
variant of safe mode does the same... the machine reboots and reboots
and reboots.
My question is... is it just our computers or are there thousands of
w2k machines out there having the same problem? If the second is true.
IS Microsoft going to do something about this fiasco. In my opinion
the damage caused by the update is comparable to the damage made by a
worm. Anyone has found another solution that doesn't require reinstall
the OS, or buy a new computer (which may be cheaper than fixing all
the machines one by one!!)
Thanks for reading
 
We have about 20 PC's with this issue now. We, too, are trying to resolve,
and it started after the updates.
 
I don't think that (one of) the user profiles is causing this, you
should load the System Hive and change the Auto Reboot behaviour and see
if you can get an actual bugcheck error message/code to work with. The
hive will be in the %systemroot%\system32\config folder. The hive you
want to load is the SYSTEM hive (without an extension).

Change the value data in the AutoReboot value to 0 (zero), instead of
1, in the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CrashControl

This disables the Automatically Reboot option. After you follow these
steps, you may be able to gather information from the STOP error message
and resolve the problem that prevents the computer from starting.

*ControlSetNNN note*

You will notice that on a dormant NT system the registry has no
CurrentControlSet key, it only has ControlSetnnn keys (ControlSet001,
ControlSet002...) The CurrentControlSet key is created from one of the
numbered keys when the computer reboots. To determine which Control Set
will load when computer boots look at the
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Select key. The numbers there indicate which
Control Set will be loaded depending on which boot option is chosen.
Edit the AutoReboot value in the appropriate Control Set.

John
 
In my organization we experienced the same problem. Most of our
desktops are wXP but we still have some 15 to 20 machines running on
w2k. We have a policy to automatically install the latest updates as
they became available from Microsoft's website. I am pointing at
yesterday's (may 9 2007) updates as the source of our (now 8 machines)
w2k computers rebooting right before getting to the login screen. Any
variant of safe mode does the same... the machine reboots and reboots
and reboots.
My question is... is it just our computers or are there thousands of
w2k machines out there having the same problem? If the second is true.
IS Microsoft going to do something about this fiasco. In my opinion
the damage caused by the update is comparable to the damage made by a
worm. Anyone has found another solution that doesn't require reinstall
the OS, or buy a new computer (which may be cheaper than fixing all
the machines one by one!!)
Thanks for reading
Click to expand...

There are reports of the update causing problems (on Windows 2000) all
over the place, you aren't the only one affected by this. Some users
are asking about it on the XP newsgroups. Users on other groups have
sucessfully uninstalled the patch from the Recovery Console and
recovered from the error caused by the patch. I haven't yet seen the
actual buccheck error message so I don't know why or what exactly causes
the computer to go into a continuous reboot loop.

John
 
We have the problem also. Got off phone with MS a while ago. Here is what I
have done so far.
-Repair using 2k CD
-after reparir if now desktop shows do ctl-alt-del, task manager, run new
task "explorer.exe.
-turn off win update and run manually do not indatll kb931765 kb819699 or
other updates with 0 kb size.
-after updates desktop should load. Worked on 2 I've done so far. MS still
working on fix.
*Note* if you are going the uninstall route
if you are trying to do an spunint from recovery console you must rename the
spuninst.txt to spuninst.bat and run it by typint "batch spuninstal.bat" at
the prompt.
SPUNINST.exe will only work if windows is loaded. EXE won't work in rec
console MS tell me.
 
Unfortunately this did not work for me.

The system repair appears to be successful - but as soon as windows starts
to load I get the same symptoms.

Just before log in - system reboots.

Just a note - not sure if anyone else is experiencing, the monitor appears
to refresh several times (on/off) just before system re-boots. Not sure if
this is related... Never noticed it before (But I do not use w2k machines.)

It's as if a hardware problem..... but three seperate machines
simultaneous?? and just after the updates. Very strange. More than
coincidence?
 
We are still on the phone with MS, nothing has worked thus far..we can't get
KB931768 to completely uninstall...we have not tried a repair, or parallel
install yet.
 
We are now trying a parallel install on one PC, and a repair on another PC.
Wish us luck, otherwise, its time to get out the image disks.
 
We are still on the phone with MS, nothing has worked thus far..we can't get
KB931768 to completely uninstall...we have not tried a repair, or parallel
install yet.










- Show quoted text -
Click to expand...

We're an educational institution with several dozen Windows 2000
machines on campus. We have been battling this since Wednesday
morning. I have tried uninstalling practically every update without
success. I have tried running "batch spuninst.txt" and "batch
spuninst.bat" (after renaming the file from .txt to .bat) but with no
success. It seems to run the process, but the computer still reboots
just before login.

We have resorted to taking a ghost image of the win2k machine,
reloading Windows XP (which may mean more RAM, or, in the worst cases,
a newer computer) and extracting the data off the win2k image. We can
do this process in about 2 hours. Lots of hands on work, but until we
see some sort of fix from MS, we need these systems to be up and
running.
 
Run repair again.
I had to run the repair more than once on a few of my machines before it
would boot fully. I even had to run it 3 times on one. I spent close to 4
hours on the phone with tech support. After I ran a repair the rep had me
install all the critical updates accept the 3 that had 0kb file size. Very
strange, durring a few of the many, many reboots while installing update
after update the 0kb size updates where removed and did not show in the list
when I ran update. Then they popped back up later along with another 0kb
update. Rep advised me to NOT install those as they may be bad. After I run
repair and turn off automatic updates I just leave it off for now. I'll wait
'till the fix it before I crash 50 pc again. Then I'll test it on 1 or 2 just
to be sure.
 
We have gotten the "Repair" choice (from the 2nd prompt within Windows setup)
to work, and restore the PC's to a usable state, BUT, the users can't use
Outlook to connect to our Exchange servers, as if the connector is broken.
 
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