XP Recovery Problems

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Hello all,
Need a little direction here. My system is a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop,
DVD/CDR (no floppy) XP Professional that crashes on bootup with following
blue screen error:
Stop: C0000218 Registry File Failure
Registry cannot load the hive file.
SystemRoot\System32\config\software

Bios Diags all passed relating to startup issues, except for a few read and
verify errors on the hard drive, (maybe the source of all my problems.??)
I've loaded the XP Recovery CD and booted up to the Welcome to Setup Screen.
My Options are:
"ENTER" Setup XP
"R" Repair a windows XP installation using recovery console.
According to Dell support, I don't want the "R" option until after accepting
the license agreement.
So I "ENTER" SetupXP and accept the license screen (F8). The setup
screen came up and listed my drive partitions. My options here were:
"ENTER" setup windows on the selected partition.
"D" delete disk partition
"C" create disk partition.
According to the forums I've searched I should have a "R" option to recover
the existing partition. Entering "R" does nothing. If I understand
correctly, hitting "ENTER" at this point will wipe the disk and do a fresh
install of XP. (There goes my data I'm trying to save.)

So I start over again and reload the Recovery CD. This time, instead of
entering the setup and going to the license screen, I opted for "R" and went
straight to the recovery console.
First screen was "which windows installation would you like to log onto" I
selected C:\windows.
Then is asks for the Admin Password.
No Admin Pwd was setup on this machine. I left it blank and hit enter.
It would not accept the blank password.
I backed out, went to bios setup, enabled Admin and gave it a password.
But as you've already guessed, the recovery console would not accept the new
password.
According to Microsoft article # 308402, the Admin Password problem was
probably caused by Dell using a program such as Sysprep image to initially
prepare the hard drive for loading. But they wouldn't admit to that, nor
were they very helpful in providing a work around solution. Their advise
was format and reload.

I've searched microsoft knowledge base, the dell forums, and I've hit dead
ends. I don't have a floppy in the laptop, so I can't make the 6 floppy
boot disks. I can't boot up the operating system, so I can't go into
windows control panel and recover from there. I need someway to work
around the admin password issue, or someway to boot up the OS from CD. I
think if I can rewrite the registry, or get past the password issue, I'll
probably be able to boot the OS and recover my files. Ideas anyone?





.



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