Is Win2k Registry recovery possible?

[LordKestrel]

I have a dual boot box with Win2k and Win98. I had a bad pci slot, and it corrupted the ide channel when ever something was plugged into the slot. I didn't figure out that was the problem until I had booted both partitions, thereby corrupting the registry when it tried to read/write it from each partition. After realizing that was the problem, I booted the 98 partition up, and the registry recover program ran, box rebooted, and 98 came up fine. However, the same didn't happen with the 2k side. When I boot, it begins to load, but at the very end of the non-gui load, it crashed with a blue screen stating that it can't load the HKEY_SOFTWARE hive. Since you have to load that to get into the safe mode command prompt as well, I can't get in at all. I've tried to do a repair off of the cd, but it can't find my Win2k install. Are there any tools that would recover (or put a default hive in place)? I'd prefer to not reinstall 2k, but if I have to, I will.

No, no backups (my tape drive stopped having the capacity several years ago), and I haven't run rdisk in well over a year. My guess is that it's time to bite the bullet and reinstall, but any tips are much appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Psychoholic]

Without a backup of the hive or an ERD, I'm afraid not. It is possible to import the registry hive into a session on either a remote computer or by installing the disk in another computer. However if the hive is corrupt there is little chance you could correct it all. This method is best used when you know a few keys that need to be changed.

 

[LordKestrel]

Do you think an upgrade to XP would take? Even if I all I got out of it was a migration of the users, it'd be worth it to me. The biggest problem I have with doing a reinstall is having to then import the old sam to get my users back.

 

[Psychoholic]

You can try it. However, even if it worked I personally woudn't trust an upgrade made over a corrupt installation.