Security Accounts Manager or SAM is a Windows registry component stored as a database to store users' passwords in hashed format. If the file gets deleted somehow, the odds are attacker can log into your system account. Apart from such security breaches, if the file goes missing or get corrupt, your Windows system gives some errors while system boot-up. To resolve such problems, you might need to reinstall the operating system and consequently, restore data from backup. Data restoration issues are observed if you don't have any valid data backup. Thus, you should use Hard Drive Recovery tools to effectively recover data thus lost.


Consider that you use Windows XP system and when you try to start the system, it gives the following error message:

Security Accounts Manager initialization failed because of the following error: A device attached to the system is not functioning.
Error Status: 0xc0000001.
Please click OK to shut down this system and reboot into Safe Mode, check event log for more detailed information.

The above error is typically observed with a Windows XP Home Edition or Windows XP Professional based computer system. However, if you try to start the computer in Windows safe mode, you get the same error as above.

Cause

You encounter this error if SAM file is missing or corrupted/damaged.

Solution

In order to solve such SAM issues, you need to replace the file or restore it from a backup. You need to follow any of these methods to troubleshoot the problem:

Restore the SAM file from backup. You can do this only if you have used a backup utility that could backup system state.
Copy SAM file from C:\WINDOWS\repair to C:\WINDOWS\system32\config
Reinstall Windows and restore data from backup.

If no clean backup exists, you need to use Hard Drive Recovery Software that are fully-featured data recovery applications designed to perform safe and effective recovery of all the lost data. Hard Drive Recovery utilities are graphically rich applications that incorporate high-end scanning algorithms to examine a logically crashed drive. You can use such tools in all logical data loss scenarios.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is a fully-featured and advanced recovery solution to recover lost/missing/deleted data for Windows 7 RC1, Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000. It is a non-destructive Hard Drive Recovery Software built with powerful technology and embedded with suitable options. The application provides advanced features, such as Drive Status, Disk Cloning, Disk Imaging and more.By: mnkstllrArticle Directory: http://www.articledashboard.comAuthor is researching on the hard drive related problems and explains the situations Security Accounts Manager initialization failure that can cause data loss .Author has given solution of hard drive recovery and suggested to use hard drive recovery software.