Dan had a custom Built PC put together that ended up not able to boot into windows or auto-repair and wanted me to take a look. I do have extra memory, extra drives, extra video cards etc lying around and those come in handy when trying to diagnose these types of errors. However, as it turned out, there was nothing wrong with the hardware.
So first I just hooked it up and said meh it might just work... Stranger things have happened. It didn't...
So I tried the auto-repair. It of course didn't work.
CHKDSK - no issues
Chkdsk takes a while so I had to clean the case. I get OCD about dirty filters on computers and on central air units. ;)
I swapped out the video cards. There was an odd display issue in windows repair... One part of the screen was blurry warped. Seemed to be odd... but swapping video cards didn't help.
I swapped the memory locations... I booted once with no ram and then played musical chairs. No difference. (Make sure the Power cord is OUT and the motherboard LED is off before you putz with ram... I would recommend grounding yourself too.)
I changed all the sata cables to be in physically different places. No effect.
So I tried some other things too... system restore wouldn't work, none of the repair points were available. So I was resigned to reinstall from scratch just so it would be fixed but since I have all these cool pictures I though I would try some google-fu.
That led me almost immediately to here: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-system/windows-7-64-bit-bsod-stop-error-0x0f4-fixed/f4a12a56-30d9-492e-9ed1-3a2504feb5a7
Pegasus [MVP] wrote: It seems you fell into the "Registry Cleaner" trap. Lots of boastful promises, in most cases no measurable improvement, in some cases fatally damaged installations. There is a chance that an undamaged backup copy of the registry files is still around. Try this:
1. Keep tapping F8 during the early boot phase.
2. Select Safe Mode Command Prompt from the menu.
3. Log on as Administrator if prompted.
4. Select Repair when prompted.
5. Select the Command Prompt.
6. Identify the correct drive letter for your Windows installation. It could be drive E: or F:. You do it by typing the commands
dir C:\Win*
dir D:\Win*
dir E:\Win*
until you find the Windows folder.
I will call that drive "Q:".
7. Type these commands:
cd /d Q:\windows\System32\config
xcopy *.* Q:\RegBack\
cd RegBack
dir
8. Examine the dates of the Software, System and SAM files. Were the files created before or after your problem became apparent?
9. If they were made before the problem became apparent then you can type these commands:
copy /y software ..
copy /y System ..
copy /y Sam ..
(the two dots are part of each command)
10. Reboot normally. If things do not work out then you can backtrack by copying the original registry files from Q:\Regback to Q:\Windows\System32\config.
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So I rebooted and wala into windows. So I figured I would log in just to see if all is well and just take a look at what pops up:
Root cause FTW.
