Holy ****, need help urgently....

[scottdavies2k]

I get this message whenever I turn my PC on and try and run my default OS (Windows). It's white writing on a blue screen.....

STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE
or its log or alternate
It is corrupt, absent or non-writeable.

Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete
Contact your system administrator or technical support group for further assistance.

i need to resolve this as quick as possible, I've got ann assignment I'm working on which needs to be finished before Friday.
Scott

[Henk Poley]

Uhm, what have you done? Is it related to Knoppix?

btw, you could try to do (type..) your assignment with OpenOffice from Knoppix. Do you have a FAT32 partition, it would be wise to use that for the files. Last time I heard about the Linux NTFS mounter it seemed unstable, has been some months ago though.

[Superstoned]

Well, it looks like winblow$ has blown its registry up, and is unable to recover it. That's pretty bad... I dont know how to solve this, I guess you'll have to reinstall windoze. but for now, you can indeed use the knoppix live cd to do your work - using Koffice, or OpenOffice. (both will do, for normal work).

Just download, and burn the most recent knoppix iso. then reboot with the knoppix in the tray, and use knoppix to do your work... I dont think it'll be difficult. You can use knoppix for reading files from your h-disk, but if the filesystem is NTFS you'll have to use a floppydisk or something like that to save your files.

[Duffin444]

There are quite a lot of avenues to resolve this issue non-destructively.

1) Buy some of the cool tools from Winternals (http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/). Some of the ones that apply in this case are NTFSDOS and ERD COMMANDER. Ntfs Dos allows you to boot into ms-dos and mount an ntfs drive read/write. Once you have this you can copy the backup hive into place. I am almost positive windows does automatic registry hive backups......google for it. ERD commander will boot into windows from the cd.....While I hate to say it..... :roll:...... it is kinda like Knoppix. Not nearly as cool or useful it will give you full ntfs support as well as some very very cool repair features.

2) Re-install windows over your current install. While this is risky because people tend not to do it right, if done properly this will work beautifully and will just give you a new install of windows with default registry hives and your old files. There are intermittent problems with permissions after that. To solve this use knoppix to pull the files from the ntfs partition since it does not care about ntfs permission issues.

3) Use a commercial tool (http://www.partitionmagic.com/partitionmagic/) to convert the drive from ntfs to fat32. Once this is done then Knoppix and just about every other operating system (ms-dos) will be able to read/write the partition.


Just some ideas.

But using OpenOffice for the short term is a very good idea.

Hope this helps and keep us posted :)

-Duffin

[scottdavies2k]

Ah thanks guys....it was urgent becuase I needed to rescue the assignment files I had already done. I managed to put them on floppy and use my laptop to finish them. :D That's all I was REALLY bothered about, I'm thinking of uninstalling Windows and replacing it with Linux full time.
Again, thanks
Scott

[rkan]

Windows keeps making back ups of its registry files in $windows\sysbackup\rb00X.cab.

You may restore your last known good back up from here. There should be no need to reinstall windows.

cheers,
rkan

[Superstoned]

Doesnt windblow$ try to use these backups by itself? Looks like that didnt work out, so I guess the backups are damaged, too... ???
(even win'98se checks its registry, and replaces it with a good one if troubles are found.)

[rkan]

while booting windows press F8 to boot to dos mode ( command prompt only) ;
run scanreg; enter start in dialog box that appears to get another dialog box wherein we select view backups;

you will now see the previous backups. restore the one you think is ok.

hope it works.

cheers

[irispiris]

Ah thanks guys....it was urgent becuase I needed to rescue the assignment files I had already done. I managed to put them on floppy and use my laptop to finish them. :D That's all I was REALLY bothered about, I'm thinking of uninstalling Windows and replacing it with Linux full time.
Again, thanks
Scott

Did you follow the advice from Duffin444 or did you simply start up Knoppix to save your files?
Regards
-Íris