Fatal System Error

Mature people understand that automobiles can divine the existence of extra money in your wallet or bank account, even a secret Swiss account. Squirrel away five hundred dollars and the transmission breaks. Similarly, homes can detect the existence of free time. Plan to take an evening off relaxing with a good book and the spring for the garage door breaks, not a major job but time intensive enough to guarantee that you will just finish before bedtime.

Computers are neither motivated by money nor time. Computers strive to frustrate. Futhermore, computers seem to know when they have the upper hand and thus show no mercy.

After spending a day at work and teaching a class in the evening I came home to relax only to encounter an agitated wife directing me towards her computer where I faced a blue screen with the following message:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system terminated unexpectedly with
a status f 0x00000407 (0x00000000 0x00000000)
The system has been shut down

Attempts at rebooting only confirmed the same message:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system terminated unexpectedly with
a status f 0x00000407 (0x00000000 0x00000000)
The system has been shut down

I have a tendency to attribute most if not all computer problems to either a faulty operating system or else a defective hard drive. I used to ignore the operating system as a suspect but then SP2 came along for Windows XP; but that is a whole different story.

A part of me believed that this time it wouldn’t be the hard drive since I had recently backed up all of the computer’s files. Hard drives only quit when you don’t back them up, right?

It is in my nature to try the simple things first despite low probabilities of success. Therefore I used the F8 key and tried booting up in safe mode. I wonder why they call it safe? Is there a hidden command that boots the system up in unsafe or dangerous mode? There is also the option of booting up the system in safe mode with a command prompt, obviously a means of switching rapidly to dangerous mode if it is needed to fry incoming viruses. Neither of these options offered any relief for my wife’s digital habit. In my next experiment I tried to restore the system to the last good configuration. Good for who? This is a clever feature developed by Microsoft so that people experiencing problems similar to ours can restore their systems back to a point where the message on the screen will read:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system terminated unexpectedly with
a status f 0x00000407 (0x00000000 0x00000000)
The system has been shut down

At this point I went to bed and offered my system for use in the meantime.

After coming home from work, eating, and preparing for the next night’s class I tackled the computer problem again. This time I pulled out the box of disks and books that came with the system and actually read them. I swear there are people out there who think these books and packages of disks are a part of the packing material and throw them out with the cartons. From my manual I learned that Dell furnishes a neat little feature on the back of their systems where four small lights come on when you power up the system and tells you that your hardware is functioning provided all the lights are green. Any combination containing one or more yellow lights means you have hardware problems. Our system only showed green lights, a good sign.

Next I tried the Dell diagnostics CD which provides some means of testing various parts of the system. I was pleased to see this work and I soon began running a bunch of tests that might explain the blue screen. Finally on the diagnostic testing of the hard drive we looked at the screen and saw:

IDE Disk Read Test
Error Code 0F00:0244
Msg. Block 93188711
Uncorrectable data error or media is write protected

and

IDE Disk Read Test
Error Code 0F00:0244
Msg. Block 93193861
Uncorrectable data error or media is write protected

Identical information was obtained during the IDE Disk Verify Test except the Error code is 0F00:1A44.

For whatever reason some small sector of the hard drive became corrupted and needed to be fixed. I figured this would be a good place to try out the Windows XP recovery console which can be reached by booting from the operating system CD. That was my next try.

Did I mention that while all this is going on my wife is sitting behind me asking, “Are we there yet?” or maybe it was “Will I have my computer tonight?”. Using the CD the system booted up and loaded drivers and whatnot until I reached the screen where you are given the choice of aborting, reloading the operating system, or hitting R to repair the operating system. I hit R and though expecting to see the recovery console, I was presented with a command prompt that asked which operating system I wanted to repair even though there was only one choice. I typed 1 and hit the enter key. The command prompt came back with something like:

C:\WINDOWS Administrator Password? or some such thing. I never entered a password on this system and my wife claimed she didn’t either. This made me suspect that a hacker might have figured out a way to get though our maze of firewalls and discovering a lack of any password put one in themselves effectively locking us out of our own computer. I tried hitting enter without typing any password and followed this up with a few educated guesses for a password. Microsoft only gives you three tries and then you are out.

Desperate, I organized all of the information I had and attempted to get into a real-time chat with a Dell representative. No luck. I then put everything into an email since they responded so quickly the last time I had used this service. I hoped that maybe Dell put some sort of default password into the system but I would have to wait until they replied the next day.

Wednesday started as any other morning and a check of my email indicated that Dell had not yet responded. After work and school I checked again and still no message from Dell. Lucky thing I found a copy of PC Disaster and Recovery at the college library. Here I learned that XP Professional has to have a password for the administrator account. Since I knew I didn’t enter one it had to be my wife who entered it, except she didn’t know she was entering the most important password of the system and didn’t keep a record of it. Is there a patron saint of lost passwords?

Anyway I decided to try some various passwords that might work especially since this password had to be entered before my wife discovered the importance of secure passwords. Now she comes up with passwords that might look like:

&tF89#b5N+

or some similar jumble of characters. I knew I only had three guesses per CD boot cycle so they had to be good guesses. My fourth guess was correct. I still can’t get over this!
Now at the command prompt I typed Chkdsk /r and hit enter. After about thirty minutes the display indicates that two repairs had been attempted. There is a temptation to fiddle with the boot section of the hard drive but as a scientist I know you should never make two changes at once. So I attempt with suppressed excitement to reboot the system normally. The seconds ticked and the old familiar desktop photo popped into view. From the cheering coming from over my shoulder I assume I did a good thing.