Windows refuses to boot - registry issues

A few hours ago, my system locked up all of a sudden, so I rebooted it.

When booting, I got a screen telling me the file that the HKLM hive of my registry was located in was corrupt. I rebooted again, but I got the same error again.

I followed the screen's instructions to use my windows disk to repair, but when I tried booting from it, my PC bluescreened in relation to disk.sys

I'm at a bit of a loss here as to how this could be fixed...

I'm running 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate

anonymous coward

Posted 2009-10-03T06:39:17.360

Reputation: 427

Answers

Try logging in Safe Mode (boot & press F8) & make a new account (will mostly not work as HKLM is corrupted) or restore to a previous state using system restore.

If it fails, try repairing Windows again using the CD.

If it fails, I think you may need to clean install Windows again.

If you want to take a backup of your personal data present on the Windows drive (mostly C:) before you format, you can use many free tools which allow you to boot via CD (UBCD) or USB(Pen drive Linux).

Ganesh R.

Posted 2009-10-03T06:39:17.360

Reputation: 4 869

Simply logging into Safe Mode works perfectly... Odd. :S – anonymous coward – 2009-10-03T22:58:54.100

Late to the party but this may help others.

Back up your Important data first, just in case you have a failing hard drive

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/use-ubuntu-live-cd-to-backup-files-from-your-dead-windows-computer/

Perform a chkdsk, it may be the only thing that is wrong is file corruption, which this will attempt fix.

Boot from a Vista Install disk or use F8 and choose "repair your computer" if it is available. enter image description here

Use the command prompt to run a chkdsk. Once you are at the cmd line, type the line below and hit enter key, it will take some time to complete, do not interrupt the process.

chkdsk /r C:

How to boot into the command prompt from a Vista DVD or F8

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial147.html

Moab

Posted 2009-10-03T06:39:17.360

Reputation: 54 203

First try to boot using F8 to the Last Known Good Configuration.

If this doesn't work, see this Microsoft support article:
How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting
As the article is about XP, better check at each step that it really applies to Vista.

harrymc

Posted 2009-10-03T06:39:17.360

Reputation: 306 093

The instructions looked overly complicated. But worth a try. – Ganesh R. – 2009-10-03T07:58:45.657