Yes, my story of a couple of months ago, almost exactly; though
I did manage to preserve the hard drive and the installed
software. The registry was gonzo, and there was nothing
for it but to reinstall the whole thing.
The root of the problem (I think, you never really know) was
in the registry corruption I lost the disk configuration.
In my naivete, when I first installed NT I fiddled with
disk partitions and the NT partition ended up on drive G,
which is physically the second partition on the "C" drive,
by which I mean the primary disk on the primary IDE controller.
Now, as it happens, my partition configuration has changed
so the letter "G" no longer gets assigned to the system
root partition in the normal course of disk-letter assignment,
so to preserve the installed software, I had to reassign
the drive letter with Disk Manager. Well, when the
registry went south the disk configuration went with it.
I DID have an emergency repair disk, but for some reason
it never worked out right. I think it was probably made
with an older disk configuration (sigh -- do as I say,
not as I do).
Anyhow, like you, there was nothing for it but to reinstall
NT from scratch. I'm STILL nowhere near back to my preferred
configuration.
Now here's what I do. I keep a SECOND NT on the root partition
of the C drive (a FAT partition). I can now boot that NT
and save all the registry hives of the primary NT on the
G partition. That's mostly what I use it for. Then if the
primary NT crashes, I can boot the "FAT" nt and use it
to restore the primary's hives. This DOES cause an
allergic reaction, which explains the hives <G>.
Incidentally, I was able to restore a good deal of my application
software configuration by loading the old hkey_local_machine\software
key into regedit32, exporting it as a text registry backup,
then later importing it into the registry of the new NT after
it was built. This worked, more or less, though I get an
occasional glitch.
But, guess what. I'm now several weeks past my last registry
backup. Soon, now ...
Regards,
Spots
PS. The thing that triggered all this was trying to install
full duplex sound drivers for a sound blaster. In one sense
I caused it all myself because I didn't fully understand
the procedure. Now I do, but the tuition was pricey<GG>. |
