Windows registry problems

[DaveB]

OK, my other halfs PC has died a death, fried mobo due to the inch and a half of dust accumulated inside it.

The hard drive survived intact but wont boot in another chassis. Gives a BSOD on start up and reboots the PC, even in safe mode. Reboot is too fast to see what the cause of the BSOD actually is.

The drive is visible when connected as a slave drive and all the data is there and in one piece. Having put a 2nd, clean, install of XP pro on it as a dual boot and it boots quite happily but as a virgin install. None of the original apps etc will run. The original install still wont boot if selected at start up.

Any suggestions on how I can ressurect the orignal XP installation as a bootable drive. I suspect I need to mess with the registry to transfer the original reg settings from the original install of windows into the new, working install. I have no idea how to go about this though, given that I cant boot the original to export the registry.

I know this is a somewhat less than clear explanation but any help would be greatfully recieved.

[Viktor]

Hi DaveB,

Without getting into to much theory, you will need the same hardware (well, at least motherboard, type of processor etc) in order to be able to boot a previous Windows install.
Be happy that you have the HDD contents, just do a new install and copy all the data. If you can make a second box with the same hardware, then you can boot the old install. There is a utility called sysprep on the Windows resource kit and you can use that to prepare the image in case you want to use the HDD on a different machine. Just google after sysprep (you still need to boot from the same hardware at least once).

Hope that helps,

Victor

[Toad]

You're doomed by the looks of it, however, just for a laugh.....

Make sure that the original duff XP install is the default in the boot menu.
Boot off the XP installation CD and choose a Repair install.
If you're very very lucky it might just pick up the new motherboard/chipset etc. and install a new HAL.

[vetran]

Disable autoreboot

Pop it in another PC as a slave drive, open a suitable reg editor and disable auto reboot on failure. At leats it stops on the blue screen with this option set.

there may be a dmp file on the disk that gives you a clue as well.

Most likely cause is the custom (manufacturer) disk driver , you can change it to see other interfaces but its quite tricky, best thing is to find a machine with similar mobo boot and set the drivers to the M$ ones (remove lan and set video to M$ VGA while there) then it will boot on anything vaguely similar and you should be able to bodge it from there.

if the new host is ACPI and the old one isnt then you will have real problems.

worth taking a quick image before you start using ghost or similar. You may need to have a few goes.

reinstall repair is a good possibility if this fails.

GIYF.