My Hillbilly Neighbor

those of you who are about to read this won't believe me, but i swear this is a true story....

yesterday my hillbilly neighbor comes by my house, because he "traded his trolling motor for a computer and doesn't know how to use it." so i went over to his house to help him get online, and right away i notice he has his phone cord plugged into a network card. so i tell him he needs to buy a modem.

so today he comes by to tell me he bought a modem, put it in his computer, and when he tried to load the software for it, his computer shut down and wouldn't turn back on. so i go over there, turn it on, and it just comes up with a "Windows Registry not found, abort, retry, fail" message. i guess he somehow managed to wipe out his registry when he installed the modem.

so my question is, short of reloading the operating system, is there any way to recover the registry? or is it a lost cause and should i just reinstall windows all over again? all suggestions are appreciated :)

I would suggest starting from scratch, and loading everything for your neighbor, but if you do that. He may come to you a day or two later with the same problem. I do alot of work for a non profit organization that deals mostly with the retarded, and to be honest, the go through computer issues like there is no tomorrow. I would suggest building a ghost image onto a CD with the bare necessities. It may save you and him alot of headaches.

There's a backup of the registry (assuming it's Win 9x) is USER.DA0 and SYSTEM.DA0 in the \windows\ (default) directory. If the backyp is not there, the last resort is to either recover the files with a forensic recovery tool and I LOVE Get Data Back and Disk Explorer located here http://www.runtime.org/advise.htm and is worth every penny. Lastly, you'll have to reolad the OS.

Hope this helps

I gotta second Joey_Batch_File reccomend for an image. I live in E. TX and am familial and neighboorhood tech support. :rolleyes: I have a couple of seniors in the neighborhood who kept opening virus mail and asking me to come clean their system. After the 3rd time I took the husband to Hastings and bought Norton and did a clean install of their system (including most used proggies). Redirected My Documents to a secondary partition and pointed mail storage to D: as well. Then made a Drive Image of the c: partition.

They are now well trained on making sure that any data they care about is on D: and if they have a problem (virus or otherwise) we just run Drive Image and recover their system, run Live Update and they are back on the 'net for good or ill.

Good luck!