Broken Vista install, best option?

MattU

MattU

MattU

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6 Feb 2008
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I'm trying to fix a family members PC, they were getting a registry corruption blue screen on booting in Vista. It cannot boot into any safe mode and system restore doesn't work either. I tried opening the drive on another machine and replacing the registry files with the backups, but get the same error. I don't think Vista repair would work either (can't find my disk to try it). Are there any other options?

In terms of getting the data off the drive, a direct copy using a usb caddy keeps failing saying I need to provide administrator permissions, even cygwin won't open those files. I've now tried to change file ownership using Windows as I assume the OS install is dead, but this just keep stopping and won't complete. Any advice?

Thanks
 
Well, trying a sector by sector clone to a USB drive now, but I suppose that will have the same permissions issues, at least I'll have a backup though.
 
MattU said:
Well, trying a sector by sector clone to a USB drive now, but I suppose that will have the same permissions issues, at least I'll have a backup though.
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You could try booting from a Linux live CD and use it to copy the user data from the Vista partition to a fat32/vfat formatted external drive (Linux ignores NTFS file permissions).
 
USB caddy on a windows 7 machine the admin dialog is to take over ownership of the drive and files there in. very easy to do, just follow the prompts.
 
Thanks for the replies. I was trying to take ownership of the files but it always froze part way through. There seems to be at least one file that it cannot update, even trying that one individually always fails.

I've managed to get into the files on the copy though.
 
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