Vista - Registry File Failure, is there a way to backup?

I bought a new HP in september with Vista, and now it's telling me:

Stop: 0xc0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SYSTEM or its log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

on a blue screen. I have a laptop with XP SP2, a seperate harddrive with 250
gigs left on it, a USB transfer cable. Is there any way to access my tower's
harddrive using the laptop so I can copy the files I don't have on backup? I
made a backup using the windows tool, but it's only 4 gigs, and I had much
more than that which I didn't save on backup.

Thank you.

tomduo wrote:
I'm not sure the transfer cable will be helpful since you can't get into
Windows but most certainly you can get the data without booting into
Windows. Here are some suggestions as to how. In your case I would attach
the 250GB hard drive to the laptop from within a USB drive enclosure, boot
the laptop with Knoppix, and transfer the files to the external hard drive.
That way you don't have to set up networking with your other machine.

1. Pull the drive and slave it in a computer running a working install of
XP/Vista. Depending on the target drive's characteristics, you may need a
drive adapter; i.e., laptop-to-IDE or a SATA controller card, etc. A
usb/firewire external drive enclosure works very well, too. Use the working
Windows Explorer to copy the data to the rescue system's hard drive and
then burn the data to cd or dvd.

2. Often XP/Vista will not boot with a slaved drive that has a damaged file
system. In that case, boot the target computer with either a Bart's PE or a
Linux live cd such as Knoppix and retrieve the data that way. Here is
general information on using Knoppix for this:

You will need a computer with two cd drives, one of which is a cd/dvd-rw OR
a usb thumb drive with enough capacity to hold your data OR an external
usb/firewire hard drive formatted FAT32 (not NTFS). To get Knoppix, you
need a computer with a fast Internet connection and third-party burning
software. Download the Knoppix .iso and create your bootable cd. Then boot
with it and it will be able to see the Windows files. If you are using the
usb thumb drive or the external hard drive, right-click on its icon (on the
Desktop) to get its properties and uncheck the box that says "Read Only".
Then click on it to open it. Note that the default mouse action in the
window manager used by Knoppix (KDE) is a single click to open instead of
the traditional MS Windows' double-click. If you want to burn CD/DVDs, use
the K3b program.

http://www.knoppix.net
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ - Bart's PE Builder

Malke
--
MS-MVP
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
Don't Panic!