Another techie Blog…
So Jo’s PC booted happily then 10 minutes later I get the usual “Dear, this doesn’t work….” requiring my IT support hat to be worn.
And ‘it’ didn’t work – her PC was frozen completely in the middle of an IE session – nothing worked, even the mouse and Cntrl-Alt-Del.
A reboot using a power cycle then presented a failure once Windows started – reporting a ‘corrupt registry’ error.
To cut a loooong story short, the registry was indeed corrupted and Windows own system fixing tool was unable to fix the problem. The answer to the problem lay in the registry backup directory located in c:\windows\system32\config\regback.
- Boot from a Win7 install disk
- select ‘repair disk’
- select the Command Prompt
- cd c:\windows\system32\config\
- if the size of the 5 (6?) files is suspiciously similar, then that is probably the sourc of the corruption
- rename each of the files (just in case…) REN SYSTEM system.mybak, etc
- cd regback
- copy *.* .. (those are two dots)
- cd ..
- rename the copied .bak files
- REN system.bak system, etc
this should overwrite the entire registry system with the backup version – whenever that was made. Anything installed or changed between the time that the .bak file was made and now will be lost.
Finally, reboot….hopefully to a successful state…