I hate you Microsoft and your registry hive files
Posted on June 19th, 2008 in Geek Stuff, Microsoft | No Comments »
Sometimes I wish that Microsoft were something tangible that I could grab hold of and slap 32 different ways from sideways as I watched it writhe in anguish begging for mercy. Why? Because it does that to me almost daily. And I am sure I am not alone.
Tonight my wife showed me that she had installed Opera 9.5 on her computer. I was very impressed with her technical savvy that she showed in doing this. So much so that I told her that Firefox has just come out with a new version and, since Firefox the previous has all but killed my wife’s computer, updating may be the order of the day so that she could use Firefox instead of Opera.
So I had her load up Firefox and attempt to update from within the application. And you know what? Two words: Epic. Fail.
Frick.
Firefox froze and took the entire system with it. Not wanting to watch Firefox think about dying on the spot, I decided to power down the computer and start afresh. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I killed the windows.
Apparently the registry was being written to/read from when Firefox decided to crap all over itself. And as such, shutting the computer down in the middle of that process freeze basically wiped out the registry. Thanks Microsoft for the awesome idea of the registry. I so love that.
So I got a blue screen of death (BSOD) on the boot. I tried logging in to the last known good configuration. Nothing. Safe mode? No dice. Safe mode with networking? Nada. Safe mode in any capacity? Pukage.
I was crapola.
So I hit up the Microsoft Support site and did a search for a corrupt registry hive file and found article #307545 - How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting. Remarkably, this article saved my hide.
Now I will be the first to admit that Microsoft is the bane of all even semi-smart people’s existence. I hate them with a passion that is unrivaled in normal circumstances. But tonight… well, tonight I actually applaud them.
There knowledge base article actually worked almost to the letter the way they said it would. I had to guess a couple of times, but the guesses were logical and easy to make based on what I was seeing. In about an hour and half’s time I was able to get my wife’s computer back on its feet and ready to be (ab)used once again.
So tonight, for the briefest of moments, I thank you Microsoft for putting out a halfway decent article on getting a Windows XP machine back up and running after your stupid registry hive files go belly up at a time when they shouldn’t have. You actually earned your $32,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 USD tonight, in my book.