bad system config info
- Thread starter secondcat
- Start date
ubuysa
Sysnative Staff
BSOD Kernel Dump Senior Analyst
Contributor
Hello and welcome to the forum!
Can you give us more details of what happened (and what you did) in the lead-up to this reboot loop? I know of no way to usefully access those registry files of yours, but I'm intrigued to know why you think it's a registry issue? There seems to be more background to this than you're revealing. It doesn't matter if you think you did something dumb, we've all done that, some of us more than once(!), but to help you we need to know the full details of what led up to this.
Can you give us more details of what happened (and what you did) in the lead-up to this reboot loop? I know of no way to usefully access those registry files of yours, but I'm intrigued to know why you think it's a registry issue? There seems to be more background to this than you're revealing. It doesn't matter if you think you did something dumb, we've all done that, some of us more than once(!), but to help you we need to know the full details of what led up to this.
secondcat
New member
- Jan 15, 2025
- 2
it's somewhat complicated but I'll try my best to explain the situation.
I own a laptop that is 10 years old and I wanted to retrieve some files. However, the laptop is faulty (the fan is faulty) but still functional. To avoid issues, I connected the hdd to my other computer using a USB-to-SATA adapter. I could access the files but for fun I tried to directly boot windows 10 via the adapter but as expected it failed. Subsequently, I connected the HDD directly to the motherboard, and it booted successfully. Windows started installing drivers and other necessary software onto the hard drive. After that, I kind of started messing around and connected the hdd to different computers I own, sometimes using and not using the adapter. Unfortunately, after some time of messing around and windows 10 displays the 'bad system config info' bsod. I tried boot into various computers with the same error. Even when I connected to the original laptop it displays the same error.
I did some research and tried various commands, such as chkdsk, dism etc. I watched a video that told me to run a command to check whether the registry is corrupted and I could see the system displays some sort of error for the security hive.
I then backuped and replaced the potential faulty config files with the config files I own from another windows 10 instance I own and the hard disk booted without the error. However, by changing these files, my user account from the healthy instance has been copied and the original one has disappeared. I could see the user file from the users folder but I assume windows no longer recognizes it as a user profile but rather a folder with data.
I own a laptop that is 10 years old and I wanted to retrieve some files. However, the laptop is faulty (the fan is faulty) but still functional. To avoid issues, I connected the hdd to my other computer using a USB-to-SATA adapter. I could access the files but for fun I tried to directly boot windows 10 via the adapter but as expected it failed. Subsequently, I connected the HDD directly to the motherboard, and it booted successfully. Windows started installing drivers and other necessary software onto the hard drive. After that, I kind of started messing around and connected the hdd to different computers I own, sometimes using and not using the adapter. Unfortunately, after some time of messing around and windows 10 displays the 'bad system config info' bsod. I tried boot into various computers with the same error. Even when I connected to the original laptop it displays the same error.
I did some research and tried various commands, such as chkdsk, dism etc. I watched a video that told me to run a command to check whether the registry is corrupted and I could see the system displays some sort of error for the security hive.
I then backuped and replaced the potential faulty config files with the config files I own from another windows 10 instance I own and the hard disk booted without the error. However, by changing these files, my user account from the healthy instance has been copied and the original one has disappeared. I could see the user file from the users folder but I assume windows no longer recognizes it as a user profile but rather a folder with data.
ubuysa
Sysnative Staff
BSOD Kernel Dump Senior Analyst
Contributor
Therein lies your problem. You cannot take the HDD from one system and boot it on a different system. When Windows is installed it configures itself for the hardware platform it's being installed onto, it also (as you've seen) installs all the necessary drivers for that platform (inc. chipset drivers, which will vary from platform to platform) and any necessary updates, some of which are platform specific. I rather suspect that you have done way more than corrupt the registry, you will likely have several different chipset drivers installed, updates for different platforms, and drivers for devices that only exist on one platform and not the others. In short you have royally screwed-up your Windows installation on that HDD by booting it on many different platforms.
Others on here may be able to offer advice on making that system bootable but in all honesty, and although it's not forum policy to suggest this so early on, I would backup all the user data on that drive and clean install Windows from bootable media, deleting all partitions on the drive during the install. I fear now that anything less is unlikely to give you a truly stable system.
I've checked the attached hive files, and the SECURITY hive was corrupted (dirty), attached you will find a repaired copy of it to replace into the 'C:\Windows\System32\Config' folder.
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