Another Laptop Question

[VladtheImpaler]

Mrs. Impaler's laptop (Dell) won't boot. After doing the self-repair thing, it determined that the registry is corrupt. Pray tell me if this means I should just buy a new one, or is there are fairly simple solution to it?

[MickMcGeough]

What won't Mrs. Impaler's Dell do?

Do you back it up?

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

What won't Mrs. Impaler's Dell do?

Do you back it up?

Oops - hehe. Boot. Of course, she doesn't back it up.

[To Be Quite Honest]

Might be the HDD. I've witnessed a few laptops with this problem. If you have a spare HDD install it and install Windows and see what happens.

[blankall]

I'd wait for some other recommendations first (from people who actually know something about computers), but I often find when you have these kind of fundamental problems, the best thing to do is backup all the files you want to keep and then re-install windows. If the hardware and bios are still working, that should solve all problems.

[old-fart]

Can you boot it to any state (i.e. "safe mode", or "last known good")? If so, it is probably quite saveable, with all data. If not, you might have bigger issues, although the fact that it is telling you the registry is corrupt is a good sign that the hardware (possibly sans hard disk) is still viable.

[VladtheImpaler]

Can't boot it at all. Is there any way to pull data off it?

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

Can't boot it at all. Is there any way to pull data off it?

Assuming "the self-repair thing" doesn't consist of staring at the laptop and asking it to fix itself, it boots to some state.

If it's a registry problem, you should still be able to boot using a repair utility and get access to the data on your drive.

First thing you should try is using the Last Known Good Configuration. Microsoft has some info on it here.

If that doesn't work you can try using a Windows 7 Repair Disc (must be made from another machine of course).

How to create a Windows 7 Repair Disc.

[Hack&Lube]

This is fixable to a regular IT person but may be more complicated without getting some help for others.

What version of Windows is on the laptop? If the repair process isn't working, one option is boot up with the installation CD, boot into recovery, and extract the backup registry hives and replace the ones that have been corrupted. You could also physically take the drive out and plug it into another system and do the same operation, but sometimes that has unintended consequences with permissions.

After that is done, it should boot properly. From that point on, you can run it as is or run system restore to get the system back to an earlier time.

If you just want the files off the laptop, that is easy enough to accomplish. Again, just pop out the drive (should be very easily accessible in any laptop) and plug it into another system directly or via a USB external HDD enclosure or any other kind of adapter and you should have access to files. You may need to re-jig the permissions and take ownership however if the files are inside the user profile or documents folders.

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

Assuming "the self-repair thing" doesn't consist of staring at the laptop and asking it to fix itself, it boots to some state.

If it's a registry problem, you should still be able to boot using a repair utility and get access to the data on your drive.

First thing you should try is using the Last Known Good Configuration. Microsoft has some info on it here.

If that doesn't work you can try using a Windows 7 Repair Disc (must be made from another machine of course).

How to create a Windows 7 Repair Disc.

Can't boot in safe mode or Last Know... it eventually goes to Start-Up Repair which tells me it can't fix the problem and the machine shuts down. I guess I can try to make a repair disc on my laptop...

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

This is fixable to a regular IT person but may be more complicated without getting some help for others.

What version of Windows is on the laptop? If the repair process isn't working, one option is boot up with the installation CD, boot into recovery, and extract the backup registry hives and replace the ones that have been corrupted. You could also physically take the drive out and plug it into another system and do the same operation, but sometimes that has unintended consequences with permissions.

After that is done, it should boot properly. From that point on, you can run it as is or run system restore to get the system back to an earlier time.

If you just want the files off the laptop, that is easy enough to accomplish. Again, just pop out the drive (should be very easily accessible in any laptop) and plug it into another system directly or via a USB external HDD enclosure or any other kind of adapter and you should have access to files. You may need to re-jig the permissions and take ownership however if the files are inside the user profile or documents folders.

What does that mean? It's W Seven.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

What does that mean? It's W Seven.

The registry is made up of a bunch of files called hives. These files are DEFAULT, SAM, SECURITY, SOFTWARE, and SYSTEM

Windows should in theory have backups of them. Everytime your system has made a system restore point, it should have also backed up the registry hives. They are also backed up in a few locations. The easiest backup location to access is this:

C:\Windows\system32\config\regback\

[Hack&Lube]

If you can get to a command prompt (usually via the installation CD in repair/recovery or via using the drive in another computer), you can type these commands to copy the backups over the corrupted hives:

copy C:\windows\system32\config\regback\system c:\windows\system32\config\system

copy C:\windows\system32\config\regback\software c:\windows\system32\config\software

copy C:\windows\system32\config\regback\security c:\windows\system32\config\security

copy C:\windows\system32\config\regback\sam c:\windows\system32\config\sam

copy C:\windows\system32\config\regback\default c:\windows\system32\config\default

This takes the backups in the regback folder and writes them over the currently used registry files (which are damaged or corrupted).

Of course if you opened the drive in another computer, you could just drag/copy/paste the files in the GUI too.

So really it's just a simple issue of one or more of those five files being damaged so you just have to copy the backups over top of them. The problem is that you can't boot into Windows so you have to load an operating system via the CD or use the operating system of another computer to access the file system to even do a simple copy of 5 files.

[Hack&Lube]

You could also press F8 during the first part of your bootup, choose "Repair Your Computer", and follow the prompts to run System Restore. That might work too if system restore will run properly.

[VladtheImpaler]

Well, nothing doing - no booting from a boot disk. Copied the hives - no dice. So... pretty much take out the HD and buy a new laptop at this point?

[Rathji]

Take the hard drive out, recover the data and then put the hard drive back in, and reinstall your OS, put data back on.

Since you need to recover data anyway, might as well try this first.

[Hack&Lube]

Are you just getting a black screen? The problem is either on the harddrive or in the laptop. It won't even boot from a CD? Are you sure you have the boot device set to the CD?

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

Are you just getting a black screen? The problem is either on the harddrive or in the laptop. It won't even boot from a CD? Are you sure you have the boot device set to the CD?

Yes. It gets to the Windows 7 icon, sits there for a few minutes and then reboots to give you the option to go to the repair menu.

[Rathji]

Try a Linux Live CD and see if it will boot to that.

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Try a Linux Live CD and see if it will boot to that.

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

I get disk error.