{"id":91,"date":"2007-08-23T07:45:29","date_gmt":"2007-08-23T13:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/corrupted-windows-registry\/"},"modified":"2007-08-23T09:10:14","modified_gmt":"2007-08-23T15:10:14","slug":"corrupted-windows-registry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/corrupted-windows-registry\/","title":{"rendered":"Corrupted Windows Registry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few days ago, I went to my main computer at home and saw that it had blue screened. I hit the reset key and figured it&#8217;d go ahead and boot up. But it didn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>It came up with an error I&#8217;ve seen (and fixed) before, which indicated that it couldn&#8217;t find the boot files. No big deal. You just boot from the CD, go into the Recovery console, and type fixboot and fixmbr.  That&#8217;s worked every time.<\/p>\n<p>Except this time.<\/p>\n<p>The Windows logo would show up but then it&#8217;d crap out with an error. Some research on the net suggested that I do a chkdsk \/r, which I did (at this point I was beginning to think I had a hard drive issue). Chkdsk got to about 35% and crapped out. I ran it again and it completed, showing that it had repaired a few sectors.<\/p>\n<p>Time to bring out the big gun in drive repair I figure. So I booted my Spinrite disk and had it go over the drive. Sure enough, it found a few sectors that were bad, but it was able to recover them. Wish I&#8217;d run Spinrite before chkdsk.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I restart the computer and it still comes up with the error. The error indicates that the registry is corrupted. I Google &#8220;repair corrupt registry&#8221; and come up with a <a href=\"http:\/\/support.microsoft.com\/kb\/307545\" target=\"_blank\">Microsoft<\/a> page. As I scanned the page it looks like exactly what I need.<\/p>\n<p>I also saw this little deal called &#8220;Guided Help.&#8221; Here&#8217;s an excerpt from the paragraph about Guided  Help:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Guided Help is available to help recover a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting. Guided Help can automatically perform the steps for you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Great. That&#8217;ll save me some time. Then I read further:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p> Requirements to install and to use this Guided Help<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You must be logged on to Windows by using a computer administrator account to install and to use this Guided Help.<\/li>\n<li>You must be running Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Media Center Edition, or Windows XP Tablet PC Edition to install and to use this Guided Help.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Huh? My computer won&#8217;t boot into Windows, and Microsoft helpfully has a &#8220;guided help&#8221; utility that will fix it, but I&#8217;ve got to be logged into Windows to use it?<\/p>\n<p>Who checks these things at Microsoft?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve yet to try the solution (either manually or using the &#8220;guided help&#8221;) as I write this. I&#8217;ll update this post (hopefully from the fixed computer) with the outcome.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Well, I tried Microsoft&#8217;s solution for this problem. No joy. I tried running the Guided Help version from the recovery console, and surprise! It wouldn&#8217;t run. Using the manual version, I was at least able to log into the computer. Now it&#8217;s time to move everything to the new computer I built a couple of months ago, and wipe this one (I guess it&#8217;s about time; it still has remnants of Windows 98 on it).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few days ago, I went to my main computer at home and saw that it had blue screened. I hit the reset key and figured it&#8217;d go ahead and boot up. But it didn&#8217;t. It came up with an error I&#8217;ve seen (and fixed) before, which indicated that it couldn&#8217;t find the boot files. &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/corrupted-windows-registry\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Corrupted Windows Registry&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}