rene.kabis.org

Came across a small problem with a client of mine. Turns out her nice new installation of XP 64-bit crashed, big-time. It was throwing the following issue:

The registry cannot load the hive (file):

\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE

or its log or alternate. It is corrupt,

absent, or not writable.

Well, many of the suggested solutions available on the net were largely unavailable to me.

I could have used the registry hives in %WinNT%/repair/, but these were created upon the first successful boot of the system - they were massively out of date. And even when I tried to use them in the manner suggested (pulling the drive, connecting it to my computer, renaming the most recent SOFTWARE hive and putting the first-load backup in its place), the system would still throw the same error.

I could have reinstalled, but that was a lot of work for such a simple problem.

I could have used the versions available in System Restore (and since the system wouldn't even boot into Windows, it would have to be a rename-and-copy, as before, since an actual Restore would be impossible to do). Problem is, my setups are so well constructed and maintained that I usually turn off System Restore - it ends up being a colossal waste of space and a major performance drain. Especially when it sucks up 20% of a drive which is already 60% full.

However, I believe that I managed to do something that got it back up and running. Now, this may not work for everyone (and it may have only worked in my case because the corruption may have been VERY minimal!), but it is worth a try.

Pull the drive from the computer that it is in. Find one with the same O/S (in my case, XP 64-bit). Connect it to that computer. Open up Regedit on the host computer, and open the hive in question that exists on the guest drive (you need to be in the root of HKEY_USERS or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to do this). When I did so successfully (there were no errors), I was truly stumped. If the hive was seriously corrupted, it shouldn't have opened up at all!

I even ran Ccleaner, but it came up with nothing that existed within the key in question (a loaded hive comes up as a key within the section you load it into). Resigned to do a full reinstall, I unloaded the hive, unmounted the drive, and put it back into the client's computer.

As a final last gasp, I made one more attempt to boot into Windows.

It worked.

I can only assume that mounting the hive managed to clean up or eliminate any corruption that existed within it. I can also only assume that serious corruption (as in, major sh*t) would prevent the hive from being loaded in the first place. So if you can load the hive, you may have corrected the corruption.

Give it a whack, and comment below. I would love to hear any success stories.