windows registry torment

Zapho

I'm in the process of recovering from the "windows/system32/config/system file is missing or corrupted" errors which prevent your PC from booting. From what I can gather from info on the web, little is known about the cause of this problem but its damn annoying non the less!

Anyway so I have the PC booting again (without a re-install) to find that yes, the registry is complelety empty. My question is besides the c:windows/repair folder, is there anywhere else I can get an old backup of my registry, I don't want to have to reinstall everything again!

Urban Kaos

Ouch, whatever was in ur system didn't take a shining to your registry.

Unfortunately I think regedit is just one of those things you have to manually backup and if its lost then its had it. Im impressed you managed to bypass the system registry (unless ur in safe mode), but I think its worth just backing up all you can and starting again to be perfectly honest, ud spent about the same time trying to find a 3rd party recovery utility and whatnot.

I guess you could also give the System Restore a try? I dont know if it covers the registry though?

Hope all goes well!

Zapho

Well system restore didn't want to work, at all! But the good news is I did manage to find old registry files in the system restore folder, and they worked, so the machine is good to go again, except for the programs I installed after that restore point. But the first thing I tried to do was create a restore point to make sure something like this doesn't happen again and guess what?

"Windows cannot create a restore point at this time. Please restart your computer"

And everytime I try, I get that message! Anyway all I can say is thank god for Knoppix. Thats what I used to get access to the disk and mess around with the registry and fix it.

Urban Kaos

D'oh!

I used to have major problems with the System Restore function, personally I just thought it was for show!

Anyhow, would it not be worth just reinstalling the programs you are currently dont have in the registry? They would keep the same files in the folder but write new values in the registry. Or are the CDs no longer with you?

If you really want the system restore to work it is possible to get Windows Setup to reinstall windows without wiping the old file system off, so it pretty much just checks the files on the CD against what u have on ur HDD and updates the registry. It really does depend on how much of the windows registry info uve lost and whether its worth all that hassle?

Zapho

Yeah you're right, it isn't worth the hastle. I'm just going to reinstall the missing programs. Most of them are open source, so I just have to download them again.

But thanks for the tip, I didn't realise that windows installer could run without wiping the old install off.

Urban Kaos

Yeah just plonk in the XP CD, reboot your machine and away you go, it detects you have an existing version of windows and will ask if you want to repair it - hit yes and bobs ur aunties, uncles, mothers - cousin in law