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

aliEnRIK

Id be sticking a new harddrive in it to be safe

bingo_bango

I intend to advise them of doing so, but I'd still like to bring it back working.

Chkdsk is still running trying to recover the bad sectors, so I've decided to let it continue while I'm at work. If it hasn't happened by this evening then it's time to (possibly) admit defeat and put the thing out of it's misery.

JasX

aliEnRIK wrote: »

Id be sticking a new harddrive in it to be safe

Tho if you were going down the repair route why did you not go to the hard drive manufacturers site and download their diagnostic/repair tools.

They are free and you will not find anything more appropriate for fixing your particular hard drive elsewhere. (if they don't work give up)

googler

I've used Seagate tools before now, and my experience was that they only work on the master HDD of the machine they're running in.

I wanted to work on a slave drive, as the OP seems to want to do, and they didn't permit this.

bingo_bango

JasX wrote: »

Tho if you were going down the repair route why did you not go to the hard drive manufacturers site and download their diagnostic/repair tools.

They are free and you will not find anything more appropriate for fixing your particular hard drive elsewhere. (if they don't work give up)

Because as I'd already mentioned in post 4, Toshiba don't have such a tool. Which is why we are where we are.

As it stands, I have two things I need to do. One is to move the registry out of the affected bad sectors.

Once that is done, I need a registry repair tool. I need this to scan the slave drive, but so far I have not been able to find one that will allow me to choose the registry to repair. All will automatically scan the registry on my master drive, even if I install them on the slave (which I have been able to do).

terahurts

Bear with me since I'm doing this from four-year-old memories of my tech support days. There was a Linux nt password resetting boot-cd floating around the net while back that allowed you to export the registry.

pogostick dot net/~pnh /ntpasswd

Can't post URLs so you'll need to replace the dot net bit and remove the space after /~pnh.

It'll need a bootable CDROM (obviously) and I'd suggest the only HDD installed is the one you are trying to recover.

Comes in handy for those "I've forgotten my administrator password" times too.....

If it were me though, I'd be sticking a new drive in and re-installing, no telling how much cruft has built up in the registry and clean installs are always so much nicer .

Donnie

Much in the same way, I got my machine working again by repairing the sectors. But then, possibly owing to further damage to the Registry, the machine would start up and go to the Desktop screen, but then freeze.
So I ended up just running a clean install and a little BIOS modification to add a little extra function.

bingo_bango

Cheers for that terahurts. Might be worth having a look at later. Depends if chkdsk is finished yet

I have a feeling I will be going home to clone the usable parts of the drive and go for a clean install.

bingo_bango

Had to reformat the drive (only lost about 3Gb to bad sectors), and now realise that I don't have a copy of Vista to install. Anyone got any idea where I can get an ISO or torrent for it?

And before the bashing brigade come on, I want the media only, not the licence. I already have that.

It seems that MS used to have one available for download, but pulled it for some reason. I only have a recovery image from my own PC which was upgraded from Vista to Win7, but apparently it doesn't hold the Vista image to allow me to install from it.

Donnie

I have the MS files here, but they are too large to upload easily. If you can't find them elsewhere, I'll see what I can do.