Never Touching Dos Again....

Confuzor

<div class="IPBDescription">Anyone know how to fix this predicament?</div> Well... I went a day without computer I think due to my brilliance in toying around with my fragile BIOS, (installed an older copy of BIOS that would let me use the DOS sound drivers). Things seemed okay for awhile, and slightly slower Windows XP boot-up, then the day before yesterday, it was checking my drive for consistency, (like I didn't shut down the computer properly. Continued working from there, then the next day, went dead. $@*&!%%@% System was considered missing/corrupt. Wasted about half an hour at a friend's house guessing how to make an XP boot disk. Then testing it, only to find it give me the exact &^$&*%!* error, (except instead of 'WINDOWS', it was now 'windows' - small case; some brilliant &^@$*&%!! progress there, huh?)

Eventually, the only way to recover at least something on the computer was to reinstall XP again, and erase any remains of the XP that I had.

Now my dilemma:
While a good portion of my programs remain intact, the Windows registry was cleared out, so a lot of the stuff is brand new, according to my system. Is there any way that I could easily add program info to the registry again? Or do I just need to reinstall everything? I think I already know the answer, but I'm just hoping that the shred of hope hasn't been completely stomped by the likes of Microsoft AGAIN...

Talesin

There most certainly is.... so long as you used REGEDIT and used the 'Export Registry' button to save a backup of your before-corruption registry. At that point you cn simply restore from it, and everything's happy again. Some programs may re-create their registry keys when run, and they see they don't have any. Others... you're SOL with, time to reinstall over the top of the existing one.

Confuzor

*sigh*

/writes mental note to make backups in the future; listens to "Elanor Rigby" to feel better/more depressed...

FlatlineUTD

I would recommend just reformatting and starting from scratch. It's a little more work, but reinstalling copies of programs OVER existing programs just leads to a huge number of problems later on.

Josiah_Bartlet

What you need to do is ask Monse.

Dubers

Tip of the day: Don't mess with the BIOS unless a)you know exactly what your doing b)there is a good reason for it and c) you know exactly what's gonna happen before you've done it.

It will only cause tears.

Lord_Frodo

Unless you've got a backup of your registry, reinstalling is the only way to do it. Fortunately, a lot of programs (in my experience, anyway) don't need you to do that and still work right. So hopefully things go ok with you anyway.