Vista HDD in a WIN7 PC. Need to repair Vista registry

bingo_bango

Not as mad as it sounds. I have a W7 pc.

I have been given a Vista Home Premium (32 bit) laptop which was dropped. It seems the HDD has been scratched when dropped, and the registry is now corrupt.

I can get access to the HDD from the laptop after plugging it into my W7 pc, but to do that I had to disconnect the CDROM.

The question is, does anyone have any reasonable suggestions for DL content that I can use to ringfence the bad sectors, and to create / repair the registry? Bear in mind I will have to use a 4GB USB stick if I'm looking to mount software that can't run from the W7 HDD.

Worst case scenario I can clone what's left on the Vista HDD and reinstall, but I'd prefer not to have to. Much easier if I can get the registry repaired and moved.

John_Gray

You could try CHKDSK on the laptop hard disk in the hope of sorting it out, but I haven't personally used anything that does repairs of a remote registry.

A Google search using Repair Remote Registry comes up with several hits, so good luck, especially if the disk structure is iffy.

You didn't say why you think the registry is corrupt...

You could cut your losses, buy a new and appropriate laptop hard disk, and install Windows from scratch. That way you'd know you'd sorted out the problem, and there would be no likelihood of errors turning up in days, weeks, or months time. But you know that!

Donnie

Why don't you use a Recovery CD in the laptop?

bingo_bango

Apologies, I probably should have said what I'd tried so far.

The laptop is showing a hive error on startup, with error code 999. All of the net wisdom points to hardware failure. Which also goes along with my theory that a number of sectors have been destroyed when dropped on the floor.

I have tried Bart PE, Knoppix and various other flavours of linux boot disks to try and repair the registry, but to no avail. Now that I have it in my PC as a slave, I can view ~90% of the files, so I know that not all sectors are destroyed. With it being a 160Gb HDD, there is plenty of room left to ringfence the bad sectors and still have it function normally.

Unfortunately it is a Toshiba drive, and they apparently don't make a HDD diagnostic tool for their gear (a slight case of overconfidence!), so I'm stuck with trying generic alternatives.

Oh, and of course the owner didn't think to set up a recovery partition (it's there, it's just empty!). I can get any amount of free registry tools, but even if installed to the lappie HDD, they still run a scan on my own HDD, with apparently no means of changing the scan settings to the slave.

If I have to I'll recover as much data as possible and reinstall Vista, but I'd rather not let this beat me!

Donnie

What model number exactly?

bingo_bango

Tosh MK1637GSX.

Donnie

Still a bit confused as to why you couldn't run the tools from the laptop itself. Did you try a Vista Recovery disc from the laptop?

Donnie

bingo_bango wrote: »

Tosh MK1637GSX.

The laptop, not the HDD.

bingo_bango

Lol, Presario C700 with an OEM install of Vista. It's this one specifically.

And I did try a Vista recovery disc, but got nowhere with it. It went through the motions, but on restarting it just hung. Forgot to mention earlier that I've also tried a UBCD disc. It got nowhere either.

Donnie

The last time I had a similar problem(two days ago), I wasted two days on it. Ended up reformatting and getting on with my life. Maybe you could do a BIOS mod mod and install Windows 7, in order to make yourself feel that you've achieved something along the way.

bingo_bango

PMSL.... you may be right.

I've managed to get CHKDSK running from the PC, but it looks as if it's going to take all night with no guarantees.

If it hasn't sorted by the time I get up, I'll just do a clean install and work from there. I'll post back with results.