Today I got an unpleasant surprise – an emergency call due to a broken computer running Windows 2000. Pretty ancient, I agree. The cause for the disaster was power loss and it refused to boot anymore, asking for a reinstall. So the first thing I was considering was updating to a more recent version of Windows – but nope: This machine is part of an industrial network that only runs certified software and patches: in other words, even installing a more recent service pack gets you in trouble.

As Windows 2000 is pretty ancient, I had no installation disk anymore – In other words, repairing stuff will be quite an interesting ride. Promised. So the first thing I did was booting Linux to be able to check the hardware, praying for some broken stuff to have an argument to replace the box. Fixing the filesystem was not a big deal – and so the next reboot followed.

This time the error message was a little more verbose, telling me that the registry has gone bad – in our case, it was the system-hive which is usually the death sentence of an installation. But as Windows tends to keep copies of anything around, I checked %WINDIR%\system32\config\ for any trace of a backup. Finally peeking into %WINDIR%\repair\ gave me an usable file and convinced Windows 2000 to boot.

The next step was about (re)installing drivers, which were basically scattered on disk and adding the previously installed Service Pack to replace broken files if there were any – and we were up and running again… until the next disaster.