Monday, October 26, 2009

How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=307545.
If you access the System Volume Information folder by booting from another operating system, you should be able to view its contents.
After you have access to the System Volume Information folder, you should be able to see one or more folders that have long file names made up of a long string of numbers and letters, such as: _restore{98CD7788-3445-567B-978G-F97G40B3E8F9}. When you click on each of those files, you should see a series of folders called RP1RP2RP3, etc. These are the restore points. To see the date on which each of them was last used, right-click on an empty part of the folder and then choose View => Details.
Choose a restore point that has a suitable date. There should be a folder called snapshot under each of the restore point folders.
Each snapshot folder contains several files, including the following: _REGISTRY_USER_DEFAULT_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SECURITY,_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE_REGISTRY_MACHINE_SYSTEMREGISTRY_MACHINE_SAM.
Replace the corresponding files in windows/system32/config and windows should be able to boot correctly.

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