XP Home boot problem

This morning when booting up my Dell laptop with XP home I was greeted with the following:

"systemroot/system32/config/software or its log or alternate, absent or not available". The laptop freezes with that displayed.

I've tried booting into safe mode for a system restore, but get the same message. Can anyone think of something before I start doing my reinstall?

 

How to Restore the Registry Hives From a System Restore Snapshot in Windows XP
How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting
How to automate the Microsoft suggestion above

 

Thanks Elvandil for pointing me in the right direction!
I'll let you know how I fare. Thanks again. I love this place....

 

It may seem complicated, but it is simple in principle. You boot up with some other bootable OS, you find the old registry hives, rename them, and replace the ones that were in use.

I have done it and it works marvelously. Just remember that you never do anything on a computer that you can't undo. So, when you find a registry hive, like "system", rename it to something like "system.old" so that you could always go back if you needed to. Then, take the old system file with the complicated name and change that to "system" (with no file endings). Do that with the rest of them. Shut down and boot up.

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After you are all done with this, you may want to consider making a full system backup from time to time. Then if something like this ever happens again (or worse like complete drive failure), you can get back up and running easily.

Free drive backup software (imaging, cloning, and archiving):

Paragon Backup & Recovery
Macrium Reflect (Free)
O&O Disk Image Express
Easeus Todo Backup
Redo Backup & Recovery (Boot CD)
Comodo Time Machine (Complete system, files, programs, and settings restoration, but not "bare-metal" for failed drive)
Clonezilla Live (A bootable CD of Debian with Clonezilla.)
Drive Image XML
PING (Partimage is not Ghost) (Boot CD with option Clam Antivirus)
Partition Saving
Clonezilla

There are also many commercial products with more features.