Hey all....my friend has a computer that crashed the other night. It went blank screen and he reset it. It then gets to a point on boot up that it locks up and gives him this message, "While init vkd device"...and then it says something about a windows protection error.It does this everytime he starts the system.Last nite he got scandisk to run and it froze again...this time he got another message....it says.. " "The c:\wininsto.400 file directory is damaged and unstable" and then "The file allocation files(fats) on this drive do not match... Scandisk has determined that copy 1 is the best copy"...I do not want a complete answer...just to know if there is any hope at all. Does he need to reformat and reinstall everything...or can he save his system at this point...I thought maybe it was a virus. Thanks for all your help, mark.j

Q149962 (http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q149/9/62.asp) might help with the Windows Protection Error.

Try booting to a command prompt using the [F8] key, and type
fdisk_/mbr
using a space in place of the underscore used here. That might fix the error related to the FAT tables. It rewrites the Master Boot Record.

Running scanreg at the command prompt, after rebooting, might help too. scanreg_/fix will repair the registry, scanreg_/restore will replace it with a copy made before the problem started. I don't think scanreg is the answer, but mentioned it just in case...it might help.

Then boot to an emergency boot disk for the antivirus program hopefully installed on the machine. That might help find out if a virus is part of the problem. The reference to different FAT tables leads me to think it is a possibility. You should have only one FAT for the machine to read...if there are two, a virus may have trieed to rewrite it or write a different one.

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