Made registry change now system stalls on boot

[Home Built]

Need help for a freind. During a program setup my buddy was instructed to make a change in his registry then reboot. When he restarted the computer it stalled on the Windows Is Starting screen. He tried safe mode and system recovery and it still stalls on the reboot.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated?

 

[tk11]

If it wont start with "last known good configuration" and you don't have a backup then I'm afraid you may have to reinstall windows.

For future reference any software that asks you to make manual changes to your registry is written by a programmer that is very bad at his job... find better software.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Originally posted by: tk11
If it wont start with "last known good configuration" and you don't have a backup then I'm afraid you may have to reinstall windows.

For future reference any software that asks you to make manual changes to your registry is written by a programmer that is very bad at his job... find better software.

and, always, always, always back up the registry before making changes.

 

[John]

Perform a Repair Installation

 

[corkyg]

Try System Restore first - that will revert your registry back to a previous day that was good. If that fails, try John's Repair Installation.

 

[redbeard1]

If system restore was turned on for that system, there are old copies of the registry that have been saved by Windows. These are located in the System Volume Information folder. The five main registry file are: default, sam, security, software and system. These files do not have an extension. When they are in the SVI folder, under folders named something like rpc and then snapshot. The rpc folders are numbered. The larger the number, the newer the dates on the files. These registry copies are named differently, in that, there are some words with underscores before the normal names. Booting from a Barts PE cd allows you to get at these folders and files. Use one of the later dated files, but not the latest, as these may be already corrupted. You can then copy the main five previous files out of the SVI folder to another location on the hard drive. Get rid of the extra characters in the saved registry files so that they now match the real registry names. Grab these renamed files from where you saved and renamed them, and copy them into the Windows\system32\config folder, replacing the old registry files.

This is a proceedure I have used numerous times to recover systems with trashed registries. It is not a beginners process. If you cannot get a Bart PE disk made and booting, or are not comfortable copying and renaming files, this is not going to be much use.

Good Luck