Unable to open any executable on Windows 8. It say file not found

In my office windows 8 OS i'm unable to open any exe files and also even Regedit.exe and any other windows exe. But all the files are there in c:\windows\Regedit.exe. What i did was i changed the regedit program files directory to E drive instead of C drive and restarted the system.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion]
"ProgramFilesDir"="E:\\Program Files"
"ProgramFilesDir (x86)"="E:\\Program Files (x86)"


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion]
"ProgramFilesDir"="E:\\Program Files"
"ProgramFilesDir (x86)"="E:\\Program Files (x86)"

after the restart i'm unable to install any new programs and also unable to open any pre-installed windows exe's. Even i wrote the registry script to change the directory path back to C drive but it say C:\windows\regedit.exe not found. i'm unable to open the *.reg files (since regedit.exe not found exception). i tried exporting specific key from registry using command prompt that was working. But modification is not possible, it say

ERROR:unable to access

Is there any other way to fix this? I didn't found any solution for this. My error looks similar to this http://www.sevenforums.com/bsod-help-support/139071-windows-cannot-find-c-windows-regedit-exe.html

I didn't tried using hiren boot cd and any other boot cd. I'm trying to fix this without using bootCD's. and also i'm not sure after trying boot cd will fix this.

Gowtham S

Posted 2016-04-26T04:59:23.717

Reputation: 191

If you open a command prompt or boot with command prompt, what does dir c:\windows return? What does dir c:\regedit.exe;e:\regedit.exe /s return? – Lieven Keersmaekers – 2016-04-26T05:07:07.833

command prompt and explorer (if opened directly regedit.exe) hangs for 1 min and says c:\windows\regedit.exe not found. But that file is there in the windows dir. – Gowtham S – 2016-04-26T05:25:28.727

I have no idea what you mean. Can you post a screenshot? Did you try the commands I suggested? – Lieven Keersmaekers – 2016-04-26T05:48:56.387

I logged in to system Administrator account and now regedit.exe is accessible and changed the program files directories back to C drive, after that I logged back to my user account now every thing seems working fine. – Gowtham S – 2016-04-26T07:17:51.130

Unable to open any executable on Windows 8. It say file not found

No answers