I have an old system that has Windows 2000 on it (yes, I should retire it), that recently stopped booting, with the message "Windows Could Not Start Because the Following File Is Missing or Corrupt: \Winnt\System32\Config\Systemced
"
Searching around revealed a couple of useful sites, http://support.Microsoft.com/kb/269075, and also http://jayroos.com/tech/recovering-systemced-error, which at least helped me get the machine booting again, albeit with a default system registry hive.
My question is, is there any way to analyze/repair the 'broken' system hive?
Both the links above suggested that Windows 2000 will throw the indicated error when the system hive exceeds 16MB, but the one on this system was only just over 9MB. The 'regcompact' utility (as seen at http://www.experimentalscene.com/downloads/) doesn't seem to even recognize the old hive. My inclination is to get a copy of the suspect hive onto one of my more modern machines and try to repair it somehow, then transplant it back. Any thoughts on how to proceed are welcomed.