corrupted reg. "access denied"

[jacknxbox]

Hi

I have a win xp media center, the registry is corrupted. It will not boot.


I booted the xp cd to recovery console and was going to delete/copy the reg files but all I get is "access denied"


I entered cd \ and I get

No floppy or cd in drive???
what's up? I should just have to delete the old/bad files and copy the new from my cd.

help please.

[jacknxbox]

This works

How to fix a corrupter registry, with “Access Denied “



1. Connect hard drive with bad registry file as a slave on working XP or 2k machine.
2. Make sure that folder options are set to show all files, file extensions and not hide protected OS files.
3. Navigate to \windows\system32\config folder on sick hd and move Default, Software, Security, System and Sam registry files to a temporary folder.
4. Navigate to System Volume Information folder on sick hd and take ownership of folder.
5. Navigate into System Volume Information folder and you will find a folder that starts out _restore and has a lot of hex digits after it.
6. Navigate into this folder and you will see some folder that are named rpXX where XX is a number.
7. Change the view to details view. Pick an rpXX folder near the end datewise. I don't pick the latest one just in case XP managed to back up a bad set of registry hives. I usually pick the 3rd one from the latest.
8. Navigate into this directory and then into the directory named Snapshot.
9. You will find roughly 20 files (and a directory) in this folder. You want the 5 that are named _registry_machine_.default, _registry_machine_sam, _registry_machine_software, _registry_machine_security and _registry_machine_system (these files are all in caps in this directory).
10. Pick these files and copy them to the \windows\system32\config folder.
11. You should now be back in the \windows\system32\config folder. Rename these files to Default, Sam, Software, Security and System, respectively.
12. Shutdown, put drive back in original machine. If that was all that was wrong, you should be able to boot now. If it was not all that was wrong, you should be able to run a repair install now.