So today I'm handed a laptop and told "fix it".

It's an IBM T43, pretty nice, 2.0GHz, 1.5Gb I think.

When I first tried booting it, it took like 20 minutes to get past the "loading personal settings" dialogue.

Main Issue: It halts with a pronouncement:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}

The Windows Logon Process system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000006 (0x00000000 0x00000000).

Side issue No. 1: It announces "cannot load local profile", then sometimes 'loading temporary profile". during the boot process

Side issue No. 2: I pressed the "press 'Access IBM' to interrupt boot" button, figuring it would bring up the BIOS (I thought maybe cache was turned off by the performance level!) It brings up a Windows-Setup sort of self-repair thing, only the app dies with a stop 0x51 / REGISTRY_ERROR error. When even the self-recovery doesn't want to work, that's bad.

Side Issue No. 3: In Safe Mode, you boot into an essentially nonfunctional system. Pressing the start button takes Explorer down. The Dr. Watson Post-Mortem Debug Thingie crashes too. I can slog my way forward using the command line. Strangely, add-remove programmes reports the latest thing installed was Skype 2.0 (2.5 is latest) and it has a "last used" date of 8/20, a full day after the system clock. I've removed it, smelling a rat, but to no avail

It seems like going through it a few times has gotten the boot time to a less dramatic level-- the time up to the point where it prompts for login has returned to normal, but it's still taking quite a long time after that point.

Booting with "last known good" has resulted in it not displaying the "cannot find profile" stuff, but it's still taking a long time after that, and now it goes to a c0000145 error code and reboots!

Know anyone with a 2.5" external HDD enclosure?
Probably easiest to back up everything off of it and reformat..... if that is an option in your case.
My guess is that the user of that laptop shouldn''t be let near a computer to begin with, just call it a hunch.

Quote: Originally Posted by godfoot Know anyone with a 2.5" external HDD enclosure? Probably easiest to back up everything off of it and reformat..... if that is an option in your case. My guess is that the user of that laptop shouldn''t be let near a computer to begin with, just call it a hunch.

People hate to hear it, but very often (with windows) there's just a very short distance between perfectly fixable and reformatting...

I agree. I just wish I knew more doctors and lawyers to work on their rigs. They tend to be the least knowledgable on how to keep their computers clean.

Quote: Originally Posted by Gzim People hate to hear it, but very often (with windows) there's just a very short distance between perfectly fixable and reformatting...

Ugh so true. I have had to do my fair share of reformats, in an effort to save people money (as in reformatting would be way less time, even with backups, than doing all the crap to fix it...i charge by the hour, so time is money ) They do hate to hear it though...it sounds so foreign to me all the stuff they have on there without back ups...i reformat like once every two months or so to keep my install clean, change hdds, change os', etc. i keep a stationary FAT32 disk that hold all my important stuff (music, pictures, documents i cant lose, school stuff, etc.) that is never touched during os monkeying around. Best of luck with the troubles

I thought windows only had to modes, broken and really broken

I'd just reformat, you could spend hours trying to fix it and never getting it woking perfectly again so a re-format sounds like the best option.

have you tried the access ibm button, it has all the utilities in there to run the onboard diagnostics, thats how i found out what was wrong with my ibm t 40, its worth a try.