It isn’t all fun and dongles, you know. Sometimes error messages happen and they need to be decyphered before you can even make a start on fixing the problem.
Take this Acer desktop I have in for repair. It says “Stop: C0000221” on boot. Then there’s some stuff about “image kernel32.dll is possibly corrupt” and “header checksum does not match”. Thankfully, I found a solution.
Kernel32.dll resides (on this XP Home machine at least) in c:\Windows\System32. And, having booted into BART PE (a magic Windows XP boot CD), I could indeed see that it was corrupt – just 32KB compared to the expected 1MB-ish. However, there’s a hidden system folder in System32 called “dllcache” where Windows seems to store copies of important files. In case they go wonky, as is the case here.
So, a quick copy and replace of the kernel32.dll from dllcache into System32 and lo – the machine boots!
Of course, now there’s the task of finding out why it all went wrong in the first place, which is probably going to be one of the Great Mysteries of Windows…
This worked perfectly!