Windows registry lost after running Knoppix

**viggooo** · 01-13-2004, 10:06 AM

Yesterday I tried out Knoppix. Nice thing.
But when I booted back to Windows XP this morning, my registry was gone. Missing file: c:\windows\system\Config
Has anyone seen this problem?

**windos_no_thanks** · 01-13-2004, 10:44 AM

This sounds like FUD to me. Knoppix does not touch your windoze stuff unless you ask it to do so.

**viggooo** · 01-13-2004, 12:33 PM

I tried running some windows apps under WINE. Could this be the reason?

I'll just run the ol' "scanreg /restore" to fix it, and try to reproduce the error as soon as I've backed up my data.

**windos_no_thanks** · 01-13-2004, 01:11 PM

Is your XP sitting on an ntfs filesystem ?

**tommydl** · 01-13-2004, 01:12 PM

Are you using NTFS on the WinXP drive? If so the chances of Knoppix damaging anything, even through wine is minimal since it can't write to NTFS disks. (Unless you manually mounted the disks read/write and enabling the NOT recommended write features that specifically warn you about filesystem damages.)

**viggooo** · 01-13-2004, 02:11 PM

I'm running WinXP on NTFS. I've not mounted NTFS in Knoppix other than the default mounting. I wouldn't dare mounting NTFS as r/w under any linux.
I don't understand what has happened here. This is my first serious WinXP crash, and I've been running it since it's release. This is also a fairly fresh WinXP installation, only 6 months or so.

**alexlawrow** · 01-13-2004, 04:34 PM

This shouldn't have anything to do with Knoppix.

I have seen this problem MANY times before on a machine with an old version of XP (one of the beta versions of XP that was doing the rounds a couple of years ago). Basically with some hardware, the shutdown process doesn't manage to write all the registry files before powering off the machine, and this screws the system. Why anyone would ever design an OS where files required for boot get routinely modified during the running (and closing down) of the system, I do not know. That's just asking for trouble. I thought Microsoft would have fixed this problem by now.

The file you are missing has a backup in the REPAIR directory on windows. So you just need to copy that file to the necessary location \windows\system32\config\

You can use Knoppix to browse your windows directory, but I'm not sure you will be able to do the copy the file using Knoppix if your XP installation lives on an NT partition. Otherwise you can defintely use Knoppix to rescue your system.

**bitey** · 01-13-2004, 04:58 PM

The post above sounds exactly right. I've seen damaged XP registry problems many times, especially on machines with IDE RAID arrays. XP tells the computer to turn off while the disk controller is still writing to the disk from its buffer. So the last file being written (the system hive) becomes broken.

This is an XP problem (a common one) and not a Knoppix problem. However, you will be able to use Knoppix to fix this problem on a crashed XP machine as soon as NTFS write suppport (via Captive) is added.

**viggooo** · 01-14-2004, 08:56 AM

My system uses a single ATA133-disk.
It may be a freak accident as you say. I just think its weird that it happened in the last of hundreds of WinXP shutdowns before booting Knoppix.
I tried system restore, but it didn't help. I'll try getting the backup registry Alex.
Thanks.

**blivius** · 01-15-2004, 01:35 AM

You may want to check out this thread and look at bitdefender a recent knoppix remaster with ntfs write support

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6546#32873