STOP: C000021a Unknown Hard Error

[Pug]

So I've been fighting with this rig for two days now. It started when I did a windows update - non-critical ones but I did four or five at once, so I'm not sure which caused it.
I rebooted to a black screen and couldn't get into Windows thru anything but safe mode.

"Last known good" wasn't having it, so I did a repair install. Had problems with this too (but managed to sort them). Finally got it into windows but things still weren't quite right {couldn't set up a dialup account - it would only give me a broadband option (which I don't have)}.

Finally gave up and went to bed, thinking I'd sort it in the morning.
Woke up, turned the PC on and was greeted with the error msg in the topic title - STOP: C000021a Unknown Hard Error

...MSKB has no clue. All I can find is that it may be a corrupted registry or something.

Anyone else had this (and preferably circumvented it with no loss of data)?
I need this rig back up. :rant:

[Starbuck3733T]

This is from memory a few years ago, but it's worth a shot.

I believe I got that same error after doing something related to my chipset drivers on my ECS K7VZA, I blamed it on the crappy board for the most part. All my problems went away when I ditched the soundblaster Live (CT4760) card out of the thing. I know you're probably using the nForce2 stuff on your board, so it doesn't make a lot of sense.

I dunno, try putting your nforce drivers on cleanly (remove the old ones, and ditch the other stuff from devmgr)

Worth a shot, right?

[Pug]

Thanks Star, it could be to do with them. It seems weird tho, 'cos I didn't really do anything associated with the nv drivers beforehand. :unsure:

One thing I noticed on subsequent reboots (which I must have missed when I made the first post) was that before the blue screen stop error, it gave me an "Autochk.exe not found, skipping autocheck...." message. Well, autochk was there, I even replaced it with one from a known good machine. Still no joy.

I got into safe mode with it to start with (which gave me hope) but after trying a few more things, I boot to a black screen with "safe mode" in the corners but no icons or explorer!

I've come to the end of my patience with it now anyway. I've tried repair installs, reinstalls, parallel installs on another partition (combined with file swapping from that to the damaged install).
My last recourse is to slap another hard drive in there (although this one reports no errors thru' chkdsk) and start afresh again. :(

[Starbuck3733T]

Hey, if you need a known-good HDD to get your files off of, let me know. I owe you a favor, obviously.

Another thing, I have a copy of Ghost here, you could ghost it to the 2nd disk and then do your clean install on your original disk, and use ghost explorer to pull the crud you need off of it en masse!

[Pug]

Hey thanks but no worries. You do me enough favours by being here. :)
I have a new drive destined for this machine anyway, a spanky new SATA one too courtesy of a mutually beneficial deal with Knipex (ta m8), so I'm pretty confident I can recover it without having to wipe a drive I already have here {*me curses the day (again) I knocked my spare 6Gb off my full tower*}

I could potentially ghost a backup to a DVD over the network and use ghost explorer to recover from that I guess but I'm convinced that there will be a way to do it more easily with a parallel install on another HDD without having to rely on any more software interface than necessary.

Thanks for the thoughts though, much appreciated. :)