Windows Me Annoyances

Restoring a Corrupted Registry

There are several ways to restore a corrupted Registry. The appropriate method depends on how serious the problem is and how diligent you’ve been about keeping backups. Naturally, you’ll want to consider the restoration process when deciding on a backup procedure.^[29]

Details aside, restoring a corrupted Registry essentially involves copying your backup over the Registry files in use, replacing the damaged hives with good ones. However, the more backups you restore, the more recent settings will be overwritten with old information; how old the backups are depends solely on how often you back up. Duplicating a dozen files every Thursday suddenly doesn’t seem like such a waste of time.

If you can’t start Windows, or if you see a warning message about a corrupted Registry every time you start Windows, you’ll need to follow these steps, in order, until the problem is solved:

1. Try shutting down and starting again. Surprisingly, this often works.

2. Boot off your startup disk (see Section 6.4.5 in Chapter 6), which will take you to the command prompt. If you don’t have a Windows Me startup disk, there’s no way to get to the command prompt without loading Windows.

   Check your hard disk for errors by typing scandisk at the command prompt. If it finds any errors, confirm that you want to fix them, and restart.

3. Delete your swap file, Win386.swp , located in your root directory, by typing DEL \WIN386.SWP at the prompt. Then, delete all the files in your Temp folder ...