edit registry

[rancher]

First off, I'm not smart about this sort of stuff...so be patient, please. My CD-ROM drive quit working - has power, but doesn't read a disk. The hardware manager/device manager trouble shooter refers to a error code 19, which says that Windows 2000 could not find the device's information from the registry. I did the 'quick' solutions of uninstall/reinstall and reloaded driver.

When it starts talking about editing the registry I get a sick feeling, so looked around for editing software. There seems to be quite a few 'registry fix' choices but do they work for what my problem is?

I recently installed a USB2 card (then uninstalled it when my CD quit working but can't remember if it worked after the USB2 installation or not). Running W2k for about 5 years without problem.

Any help or comments would be welcome. I don't mind buying the software I just want to be sure it will do what is needed. Also, I have a spare CD-rom drive I can put in but not sure if the registry problem has to be fixed first or if installing a new drive would by-pass that and create it's own world.

Thanks a bunch.
Rancher

[David Byrnes]

If you have a Win2K CD, set your system to boot to CD, then try to boot the Windows CD, which is bootable. If the drive is good, Windows setup will start. If not,I would try switching the CD drive with a known good drive. If the other one works, then the one you took out is probably dead. Cd drives (the majority) use a standard ATAPI driver.

[fluKe]

Another easy way to test it would be to swap the spare drive you have into the place of the one you think isn't working.

If this drive works ok in windows then the drive you took out is probably faulty, if it doesn't then it is most likely a corrupt driver. If that's the case you'll need to download a new CD driver to replace the one which is b0rked. As David Byrnes says CD drives generally use a standard driver so it should be easy enough to download one.

This just gives you an alternate way of checking if you can't find a bootable CD or don't want to go down that road :).

[David Byrnes]

Another easy way to test it would be to swap the spare drive you have into the place of the one you think isn't working.

Well, I did mention this. :D But it's a lot easier usually to try to boot to the CD than swap the drive, unless you don't have a bootable CD, and all Windows distribution CD's have been bootable since Win98, and there were even some Win95 distribution CD that were bootable as well. :cool:

[rancher]

Thanks for your information. Since I don't know anything about 'the registry' can you tell me this: since the device manager trouble shooter already shows an error in the registry, if I swap out the drive, will that error correct on it's own?

Thanks,
Rancher

[rancher]

Corrupted registry/OS...so formated, re-installed....all is well. Guess 4-5 years is just too much for W2k :)

Thanks for your time.

Rancher

[fluKe]

I'm pretty sure Win2K uses system restore.

If you keep regular restore points if this ever happens again you could just use system restore to restore your registry. As it was there wouldn't have been any back-ups from when it was working I don't think.

[patrickpawlowsk]

so formated, re-installed....all is well

I am a firm believer in doing this at least annually. Although I must admit that XP seems to do a pretty good job of keeping itself cleaned up. Much better than 9x. Regardless, about once a year I like to blow away the hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch. There are two things that I use to make this a litte more efficient. First, if I don't have a drivers disk for the machine, as with most store bought pc's that only have a recovery disk (don't like thouse, but that's another story). Anyway, if I don't have a drivers disk I a registry backup utility to back up the registry to a folder, uncompressed, and then burn the contents of that folder to a cd. Then I use an unattended installation floppy to install the os. They are great. Put the windows disk in the cd drive and Unattended Installation disk in the flopppy, turn the machine on and boot to cd. The installer will boot and ask you where to install to (unless you have a new, unformatted hard drive, then it doesn't ask) You just highlight the old partition, delete it and then point to it for the install and let it run. About 30-45 minutes later windows will be installed and you will be looking at the desktop. Then all that remainst is to go into device manager and right click every driver that windows didn't find, select update driver and point it to the drivers disk you created earlier. You should easily be able to do all of this in an hour. Then you just have to reinstall all the software, which is another story. If anybody is interested in more information on how to create an unattended installation floppy, please ask. All it is is a simple text file on the floppy and I could easily post it and some instructions here.

[fluKe]

You can actually create a custom XP install disc, as far as I know, which contains all drivers and apps you want to have loaded when you install XP so you just have to put the CD in and let it set up everything for you. Then it's ready to go.

Only gripe I have with XP installs is that it doesn't detect SATA HDDs without using extra drivers.

[patrickpawlowsk]

Yeah I have never gone that far though. I would think if you wanted it that specific, you would just ghost an image of it. My thing is that I hardly ever work on 2 machines that are alike, when I do, I use ghost. So, the unattended install works really well for me, my favorite part is that you don't have to enter that damn key. Assuming you have a XP volume license that is. Of course, even without that I find it easier to just pound it out in the text file before the process begins. I don't know why MS doesn't design their installer that way. Obviously, you could just answer all the questions at the begining and then let it run, instead the process halts every 15 minutes or so for some user input. Anyway, I did the unattended install, I keep a floppy with each of my Installation CDs.

-pat