Welcome to WindowsNotes.com. Why not subscribe to our full text RSS feed, or subscribe via email? By the way, you'll only see this message the first two times you visit the site, and then you'll never see it again. Thanks again for visiting.
I didn’t intend to go over that night, so I left the Knoppix CD at work, and then when I made the decision to go work on the machine last night, grabbed a copy of Ubuntu, and my external hard drive, on the off chance that I’d have to pave the machine.
When I arrived, I powered up the machine and the external hard drive, to see where we stood. It was dead, all right, reporting that Windows\System32\Config\System was missing or corrupt. Dead registry. Great.
I rebooted with the Ubuntu CD in with the intention of backing up and reinstalling. But when the desktop came up, it wouldn’t (or couldn’t) mount the hard drive. The internal one. This was not good. Now I had to proceed even more carefully.
But at least I had a working net connection with Ubuntu running, so I headed out and tried to find some tips on recovering this train wreck. I found the answer fairly quickly (sorry, but I didn’t keep track of the URL), but it took me a fair bit longer to get it resolved.
There were essentially two solutions - copy the registry files over from the last restore point, or copy the *original* registry over the corrupted one. From 2003. Uh, let’s try solution #1 first.
After a fair bit of checking and double checking, making sure I had all the information I needed (because I obviously wouldn’t have a working net connection while attempting this) I was ready to give it a go.
Unfortunately, copying the registry from the last restore point didn’t work. The machine still halted almost immediately after the POST. I didn’t think about trying the one prior to that because I didn’t know how far back the corruption went.
So I decided to try the 2003 copy of the registry, and amazingly, the XP splash screen came up on reboot, and the machine booted into the desktop. I wasn’t quite out of the woods yet, though. All of the drivers (and things like NAV) were no longer installed. But a quick run of the driver CD, and everything seemed to be back up and running.
The next task, of course, was to back up the My Documents folder to my external drive. Something that should have been done more frequently, and hopefully will be done so after this experience.
No matter how bulletproof (or new) your machine is, please backup everything that you can’t afford to lose. Photos, documents, music. All of it. Regularly. We dodged a bullet this time, but might not be quite as lucky next time. Ordinarily you only have to lose all of your date one time before you get religion on backing up.
Don’t wait for that time, please.