Got a call a few days ago from an aunt who was on a business trip together with my uncle. They called me saying that my uncle’s computer was not booting up to Windows, they had no recollection of what might have caused the problem. Upon probing, I found out that it was a Blue Screen error. I told them to try some basic troubleshooting like booting to Last Known Good Configuration and booting to Safe Mode but none worked.
They were in Korea that time and had none of the recovery disc for their Dell Computer. I told them to just bring the system back here in the Philippines so that I can repair it myself. My uncle ended up buying a new computer since he needed one for his business transactions.
Today, my aunt arrived (unfortunately my uncle had to stay) with the computer (and some other goodies.. ^^,). I immediately got my hands dirty and started working on it. The specific error was “STOP c000021a Session Manager Initialization fails with status 0xc000026c”. I encountered this problem before and was sure that it was a Windows Update that caused it but can’t simply remember what it was. Google to my rescue as always, and pointed my direction to Windows Update KB925902.
So what needs to be done was to remove this update from the machine. If the system were able to boot to safe mode, System Restore would have been the best option. For this we had to boot to the Recovery Console to remove the update manually. Here’s the guide on how I removed the Windows Update manually.
- Boot with a Windows XP CD
- Once on the Welcome to Windows Install screen, press the letter “R” to access the recovery console.
- Upon entering Recovery Console it will ask you which Windows installation you want to log into, usually there’s only 1, so just press the number 1 then ENTER.
- If asked for an Admin password, enter your admin password, or you can just leave it blank which is the default and press ENTER.
- You will now see C:WINDOWS>, change the folder using this command CD $NtUninstallKB925902$\spuninst then press ENTER
- Type this command: batch spuninst.txt
- If the command executed properly, you should see a spuninst.tag file in the folder. To check type DIR then ENTER.
- Type exit then press ENTER to restart the computer.
After doing this the computer should now boot up properly. Hope this would help someone out there encountering this problem.
