Windows 2000 goes into loop of rebooting after recent update

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

After 3 years of using Avast! Pro and Home and telling all friends and relatives of its simple style and way of working as well as effective checking I have come up against my first problem and it is being a pain. I hope that someone can help. We have a Windows 2000 box at home that runs Avast Home. 2 days ago it ran an update and since then it has just rebooted and rebooted and rebooted. I can get it into Safe Mode and have uninstalled all sorts of things. No cure until I uninstalled Avast. Once it was working again I ran a reinstall of Avast and it worked fine until it had run all the updates again. This morning it has been looping once more. I am running a virus check at the moment in Safe Mode before I uninstall again. This time I will use the uninstall tool as well, but I wondered if anyone else has had this problem, all I have found on the forum so far has been XP Pro SP3 issues with a firewall conflict. We have a hardware firewall that it goes through, the only other security software it has ever known is Spybot S&D, which I have yet to reinstall.

Many thanks

2

When a bluescreen (restart) occurs, the corresponding minidump file should be created in WinNT\Minidump folder. Are there any recent files there?
They might tell us what’s going on there…

3

There are loads of minidump files, all 64Kb. It is also still running the virus check, nothing found. I have tried to open the .dmp files in notepad, but loads of script in a different language. I looked on the Internet to see how to look at them, but am not too sure I can in safe mode? It got stuck in a longer loop than expected this morning, so probably rebooted about 20 times…

4

They are in a binary format that can be loaded into Microsoft Debug tools.
Can you upload a few of them to our FTP? ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming
Or you can send them by e-mail to Vlk’s e-mail.
Thanks.

5

33 files zipped and uploaded to the ftp site. 2 from yesterday before the uninstall and reinstall I did then, at least that was the plan… Many thanks

6

Hi,

Everything is running fine here:

Windows 2000 Pro-Service Pack 4 compilation 2195
avast! ver. 4.8.1296 Home Edition
VPS file-compilation date 05/12/2008
File version:081205-0

7

Welcome to the forums, Diazruanova. :slight_smile:

We are glad your Windows 2000 is running fine.

8

Does it bluescreen before rebooting? If so, try this in safe mode.

Change the value data in the AutoReboot value to 0 (zero), instead of 1, in the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CrashControl

Another thing you can try is deleting the paging file in safe mode, then making sure it’s set to have Windows manage the file instead of setting a fixed size/location. That forces Windows to re-create the paging file.

Alternatively you can set the paging file size and location directly:

Change the data value of the PagingFiles value to allow a minimum value of the amount of physical memory plus 1 MB, but not greater than the amount of free space on the hard disk. The key name is:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
For example: “drive:\pagefile.sys nnnnnn” where drive is the letter of the system hard disk and nnn is a number for the minimum and maximum size of the paging file.

Have you tried using the logged startup option after pressing F8? I’ve had a few weird cases with 2000 where it’d start fine when using the logged option- but then no log was saved. Starting normally would just stop, with nothing in any logs that anybody I consulted could figure out was causing the problem. Don’t recall any fixes, been a while since I used 2000.

One thing you MUST do with 2000 is to run the Backup program and have it backup the Registry and make an Emergency Recovery Disk. If something really bad blows up with 2000 and you haven’t done this, you’re next stop is “Nuke and Pave” with a fresh install. Repair install is impossible without at least a Registry backup* made with Backup. You can reinstall 2000 over itself, but it will create copies of all the user folders (including Administrator) under Documents and Settings with an extention of the computer name appended in all caps. 2000 will function like this, but you have all those original folders and files taking up space, and some applications do not like those folder name extentions. I tried at least a dozen different things but couldn’t force 2000 to abandon the new folders and go back to the originals.

One of the worst things is when you’ve done a fresh install of 2000, got all the drivers and updates etc installed, rebooted the thing three times to ensure it’s working fine… then it commits digital seppuku upon first boot in front of the client by blowing up the User hive… and you’ve not run Backup to backup the Registry and make an ERD.

*XP automatically makes several Registry backups, which makes it possible to recover (or boot with last known good settings) IF you don’t reboot 5 or 6 times, which will copy any Registry problems to all the backups.

9

Thanks Busybody, no there is no BSOD! If there were I might get a clue from the code… At present Avast is uninstalled and the computer is in use for scanning and viewing photos, on strict instructions not to connect to the Internet. Any email is virus-checked through the ISP and extensions are switched on so it is possible to look out for rogue attachments they may miss. Not ideal, but keeps the peace… I am going to try and look at the minidump files before doing any registry edits. It is such a shame, though, Avast has been so brilliant up to now. I blame Vista!

10

Thanks CharleyO, glad to be here :wink:

11

I have just seen the other thread about the Win 2000 problems and it all seems awfully familiar, apart from there was no response to my minidump files, which may be because although the ftp site looked otherwise empty it wasn’t, I don’t know. The computer is still running without Avast, or any AV, but I am getting hassled because I have put an embargo on the internet… I am going to upload the minidump files again, this time with my name in the filename as suggested by the other thread. I really would be ever so grateful if someone could take a look, since this all happened after Nov 21st it was possibly as a ‘result’ of the update Igor referred to…??? Many thanks ???

12

Lenzie minidump.zip now uploaded to ftp. Thank you.