PC Problems - Registry fix required
Saturday 30 September 2006 | Written by Richard Brunton | Technology | Comments (1)
A little while ago my Windows XP decided that it would no longer allow software to be installed. During an upgrade of Internet Explorer 7, some important registry keys were labelled as read only, and these appear to be ones required for software installation.
So after a lot of searching I found some solutions. I tried them, and none of them worked. Then I happened upon another one which I had been trying previously, searching through the registry and setting the parent permissions down through the tree.
I tried it, and something very strange happened. I couldn't access anything on my desktop. My registry was now locked out and things just went from bad to worse.
Now I can't get even the logon screen to come up, so my current plan of action is to use a spare hard drive to create a bootable PC, add the previous hard drive as a slave, and then edit the hives remotely. I'm going to attempt making the entire Current User writeable by all users and see where that gets me.
If that doesn't work then it's a Windows XP CD recovery which will no doubt loose all my installed program settings, etc. That probably means I'll be looking at some reinstalls, I'm not too sure.
Does anyone have any experience of recovering from this? I'm in progress of building the new hard drive so there is time...
Comments
01-10-2006
02:21
Damn it. Here comes a rebuild then.
I've tried NTFS boot disks with ways to rebuild the registry from the command line - failed, I've tried booting from another HD and using the old primary as a slave, then loading the registry as hives and attempting to fix - failed.
So the last attempt is to wipe and start again. Yippee.