c0000021a BSOD upon Vista Installation

Hi everyone, I've recently tried installing Vista on my machine at home which
has been running XP completely fine for a few months. If I boot off the
Vista DVD the above BSOD appears just after the Vista setup starts.

I have the following hardware:

MSI K9NGM-L nForce 410 Socket AM2 SATA onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Socket AM2 Dual Core (2.2GHz) 512kb L2 Cache AM2
Retail Boxed Processor
1GB KIT (2X512MB) DDR2 800MHz

Whoops, posted a bit soon.

Has anyone else seen these errors when installing Vista? I did run the
Advisor before installing but the only item it picked up was MSN Messenger
version being incompatible.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Cheeers
Chris

"valleydoofer" wrote:

> Hi everyone, I've recently tried installing Vista on my machine at home which
> has been running XP completely fine for a few months. If I boot off the
> Vista DVD the above BSOD appears just after the Vista setup starts.
>
> I have the following hardware:
>
> MSI K9NGM-L nForce 410 Socket AM2 SATA onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX
> AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Socket AM2 Dual Core (2.2GHz) 512kb L2 Cache AM2
> Retail Boxed Processor
> 1GB KIT (2X512MB) DDR2 800MHz
>

I don't recognise this as a "well-known" problem during Vista setup, but ...
0xC000021A means STATUS_SYSTEM_PROCESS_TERMINATED:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms854951.aspx
.... indicating that something has caused Winlogon or CSRSS to terminate.
These are the core user-mode proceses of Windows. There was one issue which
could cause this, first noted back in NT 4.0 days:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/158376
and I believe the same problem, or a similar problem, could continue to
exist in Vista.

I guess you're doing an Upgrade of your XP system,, to Vista? One possible
workaround would be to do a clean install:
- back up all your user data to a safe location;
- run Vista Setup and elect to do a clean new Install, not an Upgrade to XP
- elect to reformat your C: drive
- proceed with Vista setup.
- when setup is complete, restore your backed-up user data into your new
Vista user directory.
- re-install any applications you had running under XP.

Vista will now be installing onto your machine as onto teh bare metal
hardware, without any interference from the previous XP installation. This
will remove many possible causes of the 0xC000021A error. If you still get
the error after that, you'll at least know there is a very fundamantal
hardware problem. Obviously re-installing your apps etc is a bit of a hassle
but it may be much quicker than trying to debug the error you're getting
while upgrading.

Other folks may have extra/better ideas .... hope this helps a bit.

Andrew

Thanks for you reply Andrew. I wiped my machine last night and tried the
install again but unfortunately got the same issue. After you press any key
to boot from the DVD then get the green scrolling bar for the start of setup
that is right were it crashes. The strange thing is my motherboard, RAM and
CPU are all pretty much brand new, I bought them all three months ago in
anticipation of Vista's release.

I did run a chkdsk before installing Vista aswell and no errors were reported.

Makes me wonder if it could potentially be bad media. I did download it
from Technet so maybe the ISO could have been corrupted during download or
through the burning process?

"valleydoofer" <valleydoofer@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote ...

> install again but unfortunately got the same issue. After you press any
> key
> to boot from the DVD then get the green scrolling bar for the start of
> setup
> that is right were it crashes.

Bugger! Oh well, it was worth a shot ...

The fact setup still crashes, is interesting diagnostic info in its own
right.

> The strange thing is my motherboard, RAM and
> CPU are all pretty much brand new, I bought them all three months ago in
> anticipation of Vista's release.

In my experience, major hardware problems or incompatibilities will show up
right away; they're not so much a function of the age of the hardware (you
know how MTTF is high right at the beginning, goes really low for most of
the lifecycle, then climbs sharply at the end of the lifecycle?)

> I did run a chkdsk before installing Vista aswell and no errors were
> reported.
> Makes me wonder if it could potentially be bad media. I did download it
> from Technet so maybe the ISO could have been corrupted during download or
> through the burning process?

Yes, that is very possible. I had a bad DVD which I'd downloaded from MSDN,
turned out to be a flaky burn (grrr, death to Nero). I don't remember the
exact error, but I lost a night chasing it. I've heard of other folks having
weird errors with burnt install media, too.

As Vista setup runs, it logs information to a file called setupact.log. This
is a plain text file which can be opened with Notepad, etc. During the early
stages of setup, this file is kept in the directory
$Windows.~BT\Sources\Panther, on the C: drive (ie,
C:\$Windows.~BT\Sources\Panther\Setupact.log). After Setup reaches its
later stages, the file is moved to %WINDIR%\panther. This is where you will
find it, if/when your Vista setup ever completes successfully. To find out
why your setup crashes, you can try to inspect this file from a Command
Prompt:

- After setup crashes, reboot the machine from the Vista DVD.
- Choose the option to repair the machine, rather than going to Vista Setup.
- Under the Repair options, open a Command Prompt.
- type "notepad C:\$Windows.~BT\Sources\Panther\Setupact.log"
- Scroll to the bottom of the Setupact.log file to see what Setup's last
operations were, before it stopped doing its thing.

The error messages you find here may hopefully give you a clue about what is
failing; or at least what happened immediately prior to the failure (some
temporal association to causality?).

If Vista crashes even just going to a command prompt, then there's a very
fundamental problem. If that case, I'd suggest burning a new DVD from the
ISO image, taking all the precautions you can for a successful burn (eg burn
at slow speed, quiesce any other applications, select the "verify" option if
your burning app has one, etc etc). Then try Vista setup again.

Let us know how you get on.

Andrew

Hey Andrew, just though I'd let you know I tried re-downloading the ISO and
burned a new DVD with verification but still got the same error at exactly
the same time.

So, went back to installing XP, suprise, suprise it installed first time
without any issues at all. (Grrr!!! I'm immediately not liking Vista!)

Thanks for all your help and advice Andrew.

Cheers
Chris

"valleydoofer" <valleydoofer@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote ...
> Hey Andrew, just though I'd let you know I tried re-downloading the ISO
> and
> burned a new DVD with verification but still got the same error at exactly
> the same time.


Hey Chris,

Arrgh, bugger. Okay well that's a real shame. Afraid I'm a bit stuck for
ideas so, yeah, you might be looking at running XP for a while yet. Maybe
try running the Upgrade Advisor and see what it reports??

Sorry I couldn't help fix it.

--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au

Hey Andrew, just though I'd let you know that I got vista working in the
end. All it was a matter of was simply updating the BIOS to the latest
version. D'oh!

Thanks again for all your help.

Cheers
Chris