How to fix c00026c error in Windows 2000.

WARNING: I make no promises that this will work for you. Do it at your own risk. You and you alone assume all resposnsibility.

Just came across this error yesterday: when one of our Win2K systems was booting up it kept giving us Blue Screen of Death and the error read: ” c000026c . Can’t read file in  SystemRoot\System32\swapk.sys ”

The only thing that could go wrong – was the virus removal we did 3 days earlier. It was that pesky “Anitvirus 2009″ spyware/virus that keeps pretending to be legitimate software. Anyways we got rid of it with AntiVira . Avg wouldn’t load properly on that machine as it requires Service Pack 4 for Win2k to run. Anyways long story short – apperently it cleaned out the everythign except for that one problem.

After much searching, the only references I could find – were made to DirectX 8.1 causing this problem or bad memory. Couldn’t be the case in my problem – nothign else change, no new modules or software isntalled. The problem thou was that I couldn’t load into the system to take a look – it would just freeze – no matter what (safe boot or no). I didn’t have a floppy or disk on hand with DOS – just to get in and take a look. Seemed to be stuck. I even tried the Windows Installation / Repair option – when you load Windows isntallation CD and select – R for Repair system.

Finally I hooked it up to another XP machine I have (make sure you change the jumper to either slave or cable select) and was able to read it as a new drive (E:\ in my case) . Anyways I went to to c:\WINNT\System32\ and renamed swapk.sys (which turned out to be an empty file) to swapk.bad .  Reconnected the drive to the original machine – and lo and behold – it loaded. After soem more investigation – I believe that was the file and Antivira cleaned up but nver deleted – there windows kept trying to load a file that had nothin in it.  Renaming it – bypassed it altogether.

Hope that helps someone else.

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