Is there a way to clean non-active registry hives?

I wanted to boot from a build of BartPe or WinPEBuilder CD, with CCleaner included in the build, so that I could clean a non-running damaged or confused registry located on the hard drive of the host computer. Is there a way to specify a remote set of hives for CCleaner to act upon?

Hi SourceUnknown, and welcome to Piriform.

I'm assuming the computer won't boot, hence the BartPE.

That being the case, did you have any error messages popping up when you couldn't boot? If it was something like ...

"Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \ WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"

... then it isn't something CCleaner would fix, but there are ways to fix something like that without having to reinstall Windows.

And which Operating System are you running on that PC?

Hi SourceUnknown, and welcome to Piriform.

I'm assuming the computer won't boot, hence the BartPE.

That being the case, did you have any error messages popping up when you couldn't boot? If it was something like ...

"Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \ WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"

... then it isn't something CCleaner would fix, but there are ways to fix something like that without having to reinstall Windows.

And which Operating System are you running on that PC?

It's XP home. Boots to BSOD with an E3 stop error. "A Thread tried to release a resource it did not own". The client tells me it worked fine the night before but blue screened the next morning on start up.

I have two suspects. The first is that MS pushed out their updates last week. One of them may have caused the problem. It's probably a driver issue.

The second is this computer was riddled with virus / trojans two months ago. I am embarrassed to admit that although I did a (almost) thorough job of cleaning this machine, I neglected to clean the registry outside of the usual stuff associated with virus/malware etc. In which case it could be a registry artifact issue.

Thanks for taking an interest!

Have a look at this, which falls in line with your MS Update suspicions: (Read to the bottom of the page.)

http://www.stateofthetech.com/?p=117

Fingers crossed for you.

:)

EDIT: If you get it running, maybe have a look here to be safe on the malware issue:

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=20120

Have a look at this, which falls in line with your MS Update suspicions: (Read to the bottom of the page.)

http://www.stateofthetech.com/?p=117

Fingers crossed for you.

:)

EDIT: If you get it running, maybe have a look here to be safe on the malware issue:

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=20120

Thanks Dennis! Your first link hit the nail on the head. Don't know how I missed that in my searches - but definitely glad that you found it!

I am going to follow your second link. I thought I had collected a decent set of tools to clean malware - but it never hurts to keep the tool set fresh.

Thanks again!

Pleased you've sorted it.

:)