I was running CCleaner on a friend's Acer Notebook running XP, that had never been cleaned before.
- Did the CCleaner registry clean and fixed all issues. Fine.
- Then restarted the PC.
- Then tried to undo the registry clean as I thought I'd done too much cleaning at once and wanted to retrace my steps.
- I double clicked on the cc backup of the registry and selected YES when asked if I wanted to add the information in C:\....reg to the registry.
- Restarted again
- Error message ""Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM".
- Uh oh.
It suggests repairing the file by using the Windows XP CD - "Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair".
I haven't yet been able to do this as the computer keeps shutting down before I get that far with the XP CD (due to a separate overheating problem). Still, if I can get that far my questions are:
a) will repairing create a different version of the registry
if the computer shuts down half way through a repair, will that mess things up?
c) If I can access the hard drive via a separate computer (i.e. connect it as a second hard drive to a computer able to run windows) can I copy an backup version of the registry across somehow? Does CCleaner create a backup of the registry before it makes changes or does it simply just store the changes that it makes?
Many many thanks for your help
Paul
As an alternative cause to the crash, the following may have happened EITHER a) before the initial registry clean or after the initial registry clean but before the registry restoring (I can't remember which):
The "windows has to check for errors, this is highly recommended or hit space to skip the check" screen came up after the bios screen. I allowed it to check for errors, it found an error which it corrected, then started up the computer as normal. All fine.