We really messed up! Windows help

Hi Guys, We use Windows 2000 Professional. Eric was trying to make our startup faster and went into Control panel/Administrative Tools/Componant Services/Services(local) and started disabling things that should not be disabled When he realized that it loused things up, he went back and tried to reinable them, but they woudn't work (for example, when we tried to start them, nothing happens, when we click on properties, nothing happens)

I talked to our tech support guy (who is usually very helpful) and he's stumped. He's trying to find something to help us on the Windows website, but we've been down for a couple of days now, so I thought I'd see if anyone here could help. Any ideas?

We've already tried Windows self repair and even tried to reload Windows on top of itself. Neither thing worked. In fact, when I reloaded Windows on top of itself, I got this error message:

COM+ Setup Error

Sub-component COM+ raised an exception while processing the OC_COMPLETE_INSTALLATION setup message.
..\csetuputil.cpp(line 5468)
Error code =0x8004e00f

COM+ was unable to talk to the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator

Setup was unable to to populate the 'Local Computer' collection

Thanks,
Cindy and Eric

 

I would boot into safe mode, and then reconfigure Services too look like it should. Here's what mine looks like:

http://www.silversanctum.com/Win2k-Services.html

The ones without descriptions (nVidia driver services, SyGate, Symantec) you can ignore if you don't have them... those are apps on my machine. I just did a clean install last week, so this is fairly close to base install. The only thing I turned off is Messenger, because the service is only used for spam.

Don't worry about "Status" while in safe mode. You just want to change startup type.

 

In 5 years of business I have never seen a OS that would not load dirty (over the existing OS). I wish I could offer help, but that is something else.

Do you have another computer you could put the hard drive in as a slave and copy some stuff over? I am afraid a fresh format may be your only option.



Maybe I misunderstood. If you can boot in safe mode I second that. I take down to mean down.

 

Hm. I guess since you said you tried reconfiguring that you could boot, but that you couldn't get network access. COM+ is required to access a network, IIRC. "Down" is a bit ambiguous.

 

If you can boot into Windows, even in Safe Mode, da chicken's suggestion is the best first step. The Com+ services are dependent on Remote Procedure Call. Make sure both services are set to "Automatic". And check the other services as well.

If you can't get into Windows at all, and a re-installation doesn't work, putting the drive into someone else's machine to try salvaging files, before reformatting and doing a fresh install is probably the best idea. Is your drive one large partition, or do you have multiple partitions on it? Reformatting C won't hurt data on other partitions, and you can move files such as your address book to a secondary partition. Or move files to the friend's computer temporarily. If you're running NTFS file system, that friend's computer will have to be NT, 2000, or XP to read it.

 

If you can't boot into safe mode, but you don't want to slave the drive in a 2nd machine, there is a third option: manually copying the repair registry. This isn't necessarily for the faint of heart, but it should also work.

First, boot your Windows 2000 CD, and go the the Recovery Console. You only have access to the root directory, the WinNT directory, and the WinNT directory's children, but that's all you need for this.

1. Change to C:\WINNT\system32\config
2. Back-up this entire directory. Make a subdirectory and copy everything there, or whatever. This directory is where WIndows 2000 and Windows XP store the registry databases. This is a safety measure. The directory is probably 15 MB to 20 MB.
3. Copy all the files with no extension from the C:\WINNT\repair directory to the C:\WINNT\system32\config directory, like so:

Code:

copy C:\WINNT\repair\*. C:\WINNT\system32\config\

Say "yes" to all the overwrite warnings.
4. Reboot normally.

This resets you entire registry to the default settings. That means your programs are no longer "installed" (the data will still be there, of course) and your user settings will all get reset. Just like you just installed a new copy of the OS. However, it should also change your OS settings back to the default.

Usually I only do this when a registry is corrupt, but it might work here, too.

 

Thanks for the ideas. I'll go and give it a try. I don't really understand exactly what you've suggested, but I think that either Eric could figure it out, or at the veryleast, we've got a couple of friends who can do it with your directions.

Sorry about being so vague about being "down" What we've got is our desktop and I can look at just about anything. Getting it to do anything is another story. We had Microsoft Office until Eric tried to do the self fix thing and now it's gone, but before that, I was able to get into Word and type something and save it, but when I tried to print, it told me that there wasn't a printer installed. We can't connect to the internet.

Hope that's more info, and I'll let you know what happens with booting into safe mode.

Thanks!

Cindy

 

It's fixed! The driver for the ethernet card was gone. Eric got that put back in and we're good to go. Thanks!!