Scary Moment.
February 9th, 2005 | by john |So, my computer crash as it does randomly when I am surfin the web and watching TV through Leadtek Winfast 2000 Expert PVR. So as usual, I do a hard reboot of the computer.
Only this time, I come to realize that Windows wasn’t booting up. Right after you see the Windows XP loader screen, it went blank and showed a BSOD:
Stop c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The session manager initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000017 (0×00000000, 0×0000000) The system has been shut down.
Now, normally, I would have thought okay… Windows got screwed up somewhere. To my horror, right as the BSOD showed on the monitor… I heard a sickening noise as there was a click, sound of lowering RPM, and nothing else. At first, I thought it was my 250GB slave drive that had just died on me. If this was the case, better than nothing as it had been less than a couple of months since I bought it and it only had useless data on it.
I disconnect the power cable to it and booted my computer up thinking it would boot up without a problem. Except… same issue. This is where the idea struck me… I could have lost everything on my primary drive which I was lazy to backup lately. So I sorta panic in my mind and started thinking about what kind of data I would lose if this primary drive died. Nothing that would kill me but certainly all my email correspondences, school work, programs etc… (fortunately for me, there was a paper that I was working on last night but it was due today so I already turned it in).
Anyway, I started installing XP on a laptop Simon gave me as he had no use for it. I wanted to see what that error meant and if there was any way to fix it. During the XP install, I decided to take it out and put it as a slave to my sister’s old computer I’ve brought just for the heck of it. The thing never booted for some reason unknown to me not even to safe mode.
Then, I decided to try safe mode on my computer to see if there was anything different; this resulted in the same issue. Then I tried the “Boot last good configuration” option … and amazingly enough, it booted up fine.
After a long sigh of relief, I backed up my documents and emails I would not be able to retrieve if my primary drive failed. That was a close call.
Searched the net but found out Microsoft only shows this case in NT system knowledgebase and does not mention XP at all so their “Solution” didn’t make much sense.
Moral of this incident: Backup your data at least once a month if not once a week. I thought this would be my 3rd drive failure (first two were both Western Digital drives which explains why I first suspected it was my secondary drive as it was WD).
