NiroZ

Disregard that. I reread your instructions, and figured out what to do. Turns out, there is now a password protection on c: drive even though I copy pasted the new windows installation over the old one, thus I cannot log into it. and without it, I cannot access system volume information. But I can access config/system on the new installation.

BartPE is confusing the hell out of me. How would I do this through the recovery console.

Hmm. This BartPE is supposed to find the c:\ windows installation right? Or doesn't it matter?

Recently, when I logged into windows, it came up with the error window\system32\config\system was corrupted. So I booted the recovery disk and replaced the system folder with an old windows system file I had lying round. Turns out this one has a password on it, and so windows said password mismatch, and rebooted. so I tried recovering windows, in the hope that it would fix the password mismatch. But it didn't. So I then created a new installation of windows, can used the recovery disk to replace the system folder in that into the my original windows installation. That fixed the password problem, but now windows just shows the loading screen, and then the screen goes blank. Help?