I haven't been on in a very long time and wish everyone the best. So lets get down to the problem: I come home and my dad says the labtop isn't working. Old dell labtop (think 2005) that has a windows product key sticker that says dell on its bottom. I turn it on, windows seems to do fine but the login screen is always black and I had to turn the computer off. So I tried to boot into safe mode and got this blue screen message: "STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure} The registry cannot load the hive (file): \Systemroot\system32\config\SOFTWARE or its log or alternate. It is corrupt, absent, or not writable Beginning dump of physical memory," So I used a dell xp home sp3 cd (don't have the original cd) to get to windows recovery console. I ran chkdsk /r on Wednesday hoping to fix the problem. While chkdsk /r was running the harddrive started to make clicking noises and progress went down from 75% to 50% while it was running. When it finished today (Saturday) it was 75% complete and said something about 1 or more unrecoverable errors on the disk. I exited the console and tried to boot windows normally, and it is telling me it is missing another registry file and tells me to do a repair. I tried to go into safe mode after that, it stays on screen (doesn't go to a blue) and tells me: "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM you can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows Setup using the original Setup CD-ROM. Select "r" at the 1st screen to start repair." Questions: 1. I just tried to do chkdsk /r to fix the problem, should I try again with chkdsk /p or /f? (chkdsk /r implies /p,/f, so I'm afraid this won't work) 2. Would a clean install of windows fix this issue? 3. Is there a better way to fix this issue than a clean install or is there something I have overlooked? Thanks! Steps I might need to take: 1. Run the HDD Manufacturers diagnostic utility (Will have to find out who made the HDD and how to make a bootable cd for it): http://discussions.virtualdr.com/showthread.php?t=206126
See if this helps - but note the warning regarding OEM installations of Windows. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545
