Had a customer today with the update of death for Vista. I searched thousands of articles about this without finding a suitable solution, I thought I’d put this in my blog.

Computer boots up and freezes, upon running start up repair I get:

!!0xc01a001d!! 37398/94614 (\Registry\Machine\Components\deriveddat…)

and the computer locks up.

Computer won’t boot, even in safe mode.

My research shows that the error is due to a log file jamming up. This is caused by something in the update process not going right.

I think it’s funny that if windows can’t complain to the log, it can’t continue to fix any problems.

So, to fix this problem here were my steps:

I booted a linux cd (Click to download Knoppix or Click to download Ubuntu)

The c: drive had 2 partitions /dev/hda1 an/dev/hda2

1.  I right clicked, mounted the hda2 partion on the desktop.
2. Right clicked the hda2 changed it to write mode (If you generate an error saying windows did not shutdown cleanly: sudo ntfsfix /dev/hda2 then repeat steps 1 and 2.)
3. I double clicked on the hda2 icon (or open nautulus /mnt/hda2)
4. browse to the WINDOWS folder.
5. Right click and rename the SoftwareDistribution folder (or alternatively copy it somewhere and delete it)
6. Browse to the system32 folder
7. Right click and rename catroot2 to catroot2.old
8. Click the start gear and click logoff, shutdown
9. Pull the Knoppix cd-rom from the drive.
10. Boot from the hard disk and select startup repair.

This should get you to the point where windows Vista will run a repair and complete and reboot.

I would recommend you backup  your data to an external hard disk and then reformat the computer and setup from scratch as we are not certain what went wrong and don’t want to have to do this again in the future.

Comments are closed.