Windows Forum

Ask something
Discussion Locked

No shell after logon

0 helpful
8 replies

by xanderoth

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

Our Windows 2000 server was hit with the Nimda virus recently. After it was "cleaned" it was rebooted and now after the logon the screen stays a lovely blue without the Explorer shell. Nothing can be run locally, though the network shares are available and so is the data, seemingly unaffected. CTR-ALT-DEL brings up the security box but the task manager cannot be executed, nor through CTR-SHIFT-ESC. Booting to all safe modes gets identical responses and repairing windows from the installation cd did nothing. Ok- there you go. All I really need is a way to get to the cmd or to the shell, anyone have any ideas?

PS booting to other operating systems or to a floppy gives me problems finding the hard drives- which are all NTFS- that Ineed access to locally!

8 replies

by curacao_dejavu

Did you try install the console already.
Boot the cd cdrom and run
cd-driveletter\i386\winnt32 cmdcon.

from there you have some options to repair w2k installations.

Success

Leopold

by xanderoth

Unfortunately I tried both console manual repair and automatic full repair of Windows2000 from the cd to no avail. None of the system files appear to be damaged, but it still wont launch explorer.exe after logon.

by christotg

Here are some things I'd keep in mind:
Problem: No Explorer shell
Reasons: explorer.exe is broken in some way
1a. Take the OS hard drive out & put it into another box, preferably a member of the same domain.
1b. You may need to move the SCSI controller into the new box too...
1c. copy all explorer related files from the working box to the broken one (of course you are running win2k server with the same SP and fixes as the broken server)
1d. Try running the OS now.

2a. If Terminal Server is set up, try using remote management tools to set the "program executed at startup" to be cmd.exe, and then connect with the termserv client, then copy the files you need to get explorer working.

3a. Put another hard drive onto the controller on your broken machine and install Win2k onto it. Don't just install to a different folder on the existing drive unless you use an unattended install to move program files, documents& settings, and winnt folders. Upgrade to the same SP and hotfixes.3b. install a _third_ Win2k OS and copy the contents of the winnt directory of the _second_ installation into the _first_ one (except the system32\config directory) Then try booting.

by christotg

Note: You MUST ensure that all these installations of win2k have are members of the same domain. Win2k will complain horribly about permissions otherwise.

by christotg

If the problem is registry related, search for the "exefile" section of HK_Classes_Root on a working machine & use regedit to copy it to the remote (broken) machine.

by christotg

I keep thinking of more solutions for this - Try logging on as a different user. If that doesn't work, connect to \\server\c$ and overwrite some user profiles (default user) with known good ones from other servers and wipe the administrator's profile. The shell is specified there. Hmm.... Maybe you could use Group Policy to force a specific shell (c:\temp\explorer.exe) that you copy from elsewhere....

by xanderoth

Well, after ALOT of work, none of those solutions worked right for me. The only reason I stayed away from time consuming tasks like installing a new HD and Win2k and installing several copies of Win2k and copying files and such, was that I could just FDisk, Format and forget about it in half the time (which I ended up doing) The last backup was only a few hours old, so that was the course we finally took.

This discussion is closed to new replies.