After running a defrag on the drive containing
Windows XP Professional, Windows will no
longer boot. I have tried all of the options offered
with the F8 key e.g. safe boot, normal boot, safe
boot with CD assessibility, safeboot to command
line, boot into last successful restart. None of
them work. I just end up in a perpetual reboot
cycle. The POST is successful, the Windows
startup screen displays and after several seconds
a blue screen with some text on it displays for
about one second and the system restarts again.
After letting it go through this cycle several times I
have been able to read the text enough to see that
it is referring to a corrupt registry file and is doing
a memory dump.
I have been able to boot with an old Windows 98
boot disk I have and can see the C:\ drive and all
of its files and directories but when I try to run one
of the .exe files I get an error saying it cannot run
outside of Windows.
I know that XP made a backup of the original
registry files when the system was installed. Is
there some way I can get to this from the C:\
prompt, without starting Windows. My thinking,
which may be incorrect, is that if I can replace the
corrupt registry files by renaming them and
replacing them with the originals then I can get
into Windows then can use the XP system restore
feature to restore my last saved registry files. Is
this doable and if so how do I do it. Any help
would be appreciated. I am trying to avoid having
to reinstall XP and set it up again.

Thanks.

Larry Scroggs
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