asked on

problems doing a repair to XP

A friend had a problem and now her notebook won't go into windows. Originally therewas a message about i386\vgaoem could not be loaded error code 7. Now she gets a stop c000218 registry error - something about windows\system32\config\default is a problem. She didn't back up her data so I'm trying to either do a repair or copy or info before reinstalling windows completely. When I boot from the cd and select the option to repair I have one of two problems. If I select repair from c it wants an admin password and I have no idea what that password is. If I select the option to do the recovery from the cd nothing ever happens. If I select the option to set up windows again, there is another repair optoin. I select that and it appears to be doing a repair, but ends up with an error message that says "Setup cannot set the required Windows XP configuration information. This indicates an internal setup error."

I either need to figure out how I can do a repair so the user files are intact or I need to figure out how to copy a bunch of flies over. I can actually get into the drives (when the repair by cd doesn't work), but the copy command doesn't work with wild cards. With a large amount of data that I need to copy over, it would take forever to copy one by one. Can anyone help with either of these options?

authen-tech

I would go to a computer store and purchase an external usb drive connector. They are about $20 and lets you hook up the hard drive to another computer like a flash drive. This way it's a secondary drive and won't try to boot from it. Then you can copy the files onto a good hard drive and get them off the problem drive.

Most likelly the drive is failing or the windows files are corrupt enough that a repair won't work. The first repair option with the admin password you mentioned is a recovery console and that won't help you even if you had the admin pass.

I would get the enclosure. Once you have your data off, you can check the drive for problems(likely) and if none, wipe it out and reinstall windows from scratch. You will probably need a new hard drive however. This is the easiest way to backup the data.

Good luck

eXpeLLeD_4RM_heLL

Download memtest from www.memtest.org, follow the steps on website to create a bootable cd and run it for a minimum of three passes to ensure that your ram is working fine

cindyfiller

ASKER

I do have a flash drive connected to the pc and can copy one file at a time. But there are too many files to copy that way so I'm trying to figure out how I can copy a larger number of files. I tried to copy xcopy to both the flash drive and the c drive of the notebook, but it wouldn't work.

willcomp

The problem is a corrupt Default registry hive. You can boot from a UBCD4Win disk and use the Registry Restore Wizard utility to restore the registry to a prior date.
http://www.ubcd4win.com/

cindyfiller

ASKER

I was going to try the ubcd4win disk, but I don't have any origina XP cd's. The notebook only came with restore cd's - not XP cd's. Any other ideas??

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willcomp

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nobus

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cindyfiller

ASKER

I had issues getting the cd created for ucdb so I just decided to reinstall Windows completely. Surprisingly all of my documents are still there.

So I'll close the case and give 2 solutions credit.