Bill Gaze

Great idea. I purchased a mad dog mega vault, mounted the drive, and I am able to transfer all of my files to my desktop PC. I might even be able to make a registry adjustment from there. Not sure if I will be able to restore without a reinstall, but I certainly got all of my data. Again, thanks for the great idea. Regards, Bill

Just a follow-up. I was going through the registry change process again and I noticed the comment after I selected the partition. it says NTFS volume version 3.1 then NTFS - fs error (device hda1): load_system_files(): Volume is dirty. Mounting read-only. Run chkdsk and mount in windows. File system is NTFS. I guess this is why the changes did not happen. How do I ren chkdsk if I can't get passed the admin login to get to dos? Thanks

Thanks Jeremy Couple of things - I tried the password and registry editor you suggested, everything seems normal through to completion, yet when I go to the recovery console, I still get password is not valid. I also modified the recovery to not require a password and it still requires the password. Any ideas what the problem may be? Also, my question is should I buy a brand new Windows package and try and run recovery, and if that does not work and I still can not boot into windows, can I install it on the same drive, either trying to upgrade the existing Windows or install it in a different partition. Would I still be able to access the data in the current partition? Will it install as a direct boot disk without requiring a reformat? I hope that I am explaining this correctly. I just need a way to get the machine operating with windows so I can copy off my data files. I don't care about the applications, I can reinstall them. Thanks for your help.

I have an IBM T40P laptop running XP SP2 that is current. I was in the process of cleaning up and reorganizing my data among my 3 machines and storage devices. I moved most of my data off of the machine and was preparing to do a defrag. I thought that I should do a cleanup prior to the defrag so I ran registry first aid which I do on a regular basis. I also wanted to run Spybot S&D and was having a problem with it so I decided to reboot and start again. When I rebooted, I got the message "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \windows\system32\config\system. I went to the IBM product recovery CD and the only option that I seemed to have was to reformat the drive and reinstall XP. Since all of my financial info is in quickbooks, I deferred on this point. I had a reinstallation disk that is for XPSP1a from one of my Dell machines. I inserted this and was able to boot through and go to the recovery console. When it asked for the administrator password, I left it blank and was able to get to the hard drive via dos commands. I followed the procedure in Microsoft forum and was able to copy the initial files into the config folder. I was able to then boot windows and tried to restore to a previous backup registry. I used RFA to do this. When I restarted windows, it launched OK but most of my applications did not run correctly or came up unregistered. I also was unable to have any network access, both wireless and hard wired. I decided to try and return the origional software file and that seemed to help, but still no network. I decided to try and return the system file, and when I rebooted, I was back to the could not start problem. I figured OK, I would just go back to the recovery console and copy the system file back and try something else, maybe try and restore to an early date. Now, however, when I launch the recovery console and it asks for the administrator password, I just hit the enter key like before, but now it says it is not a valid password. Sooo, three questions 1) Is there any way around the administrator password so I can run windows and copy my needed files off, or 2) Can I install windows without reformating the drive? I know that I will probably need to reinstall the applications, but the files should remain intact? 3) can I purchase a generic Windows SP3 upgrade and install it without either formatting the drive or by installing it in a new partition so the existing files will remain intact? Sorry for the long windedness, but I hoped that by explaining the entire process, it would be easer to give me some good advice. Thanks for your help. Bill Gaze