My Sony Vaio starts with a black screen and the Microsoft Windows Me Startup Menu with 4 options. 1) normal; and 2) logged (/BOOTLOG.TXT) both of which takes me to "Registry File not found" before proceeding to "Add new harware wizard" which leads to "SURegCreateKey failed" which then proceeds to a blank grey screen. Then whatever I do it ends up with a blank grey/blue screen with the words "Safe Mode" in each of the 4 corners. 3) safe mode - which leads directly to the grey screen as above, 4) step by step configutaion which proceeds to "Creat a start up log Y/N?" if Y: "Enable SMARTDRV disk cashe Y/N?" if Y: "Loading and initialising drivers Y/N? Complete" if Y: "Load all windows drivers y/n?" if Y: "XMS Cache problem..." before going to Add New Hardware Wizard I have the Recovery Disks but when I follow the options they say that they will restore to the factory settings and I will lose all my data. I am most reluctant to lose all my data. I have read some postings that it is possible to reload the Recovery Disks without losing data butthis was for different versions of Windows and it doesnt seem to work when I load the disks. Any suggestions would be very welcome.... Many thanks

From the recovery disk screen select the option to exit/go to ms-dos prompt.(if there is one) type- C: then- windows\command\scanreg.exe/restore pick a restore point press enter. hopefully this will restore a backup of your registry. KS Let us know how you get on.