Hi Spoke to Microsoft USA on the phone for 5 hours and they couldn't help. They advised that a hotfix is not appropriate for a Windows XP boot issue and is probably a program file issue. I am dissapointed with Microsoft as they seem to pay more attention to being polite to their customers and transferring calls (passing the buck) than resolving the actual issue, at least on this occasion. To get to the point, XP Pro crashed and will not boot from the CD Rom using the Restore option or either re-installing XP (which I have done in the past and managed to retain all data). After selecting "Restore" I get a blue screen that says "REGISTRY_ERROR" following by the usual blurb and at the end, the Technical Information is *** STOP *** 0x00000051 (0x00000003, 0x00000003, 0x00000000, 0xE12210000) When not booting from CD Rom, I get the first Windows XP welcome screen with the little blue lights running horizontally across the screen (normally prior to usual windows screen) but rather than booting up normally, I hear a click sound and the computer repeateadly tries to reboot itself. I don't particurlarly want to fdisk on a 98 boot-disk as the data is important and I would therefore be grateful if any of your computing.net guru's can provide a simple solution to getting XP to boot up from this crash. I have already tried disconnecting the ISDN card, plus, remooving the CD-DVD Rom and replacing it with an ordinary CD Rom with the Windows XP Pro CD inside, but still not luck on booting-up. Also seem to get a string of around 50 lines of text with the word (0)partition(1)etc then all followed by \system32. I deleted some annoying mirar pop-up blocker prior to the system crash and all my dial-up Network Connections and that's when the system went down. At least with Win98, you can re-install without losing your data, but XP seems to work differently, not allowing (on this occasion) to re-install Windows XP or Restore a previous good configeration. Even safe mode and the 7 options you get on this screen don't work. The data is on c drive but this was partitioned into 2 drives originally by the comp shop but D drive has always been empty and not used, so the only drive recognised is C:\Windows and the D drive seems to have been lost which is not important as the Windows XP O/S System and data has always been (and still is) on the C Drive. I have already check the forum for previous posts and tried some of the solutions offered, but nothing works. Microsoft suggested changing the RAM but I don't this is relevant as it was the deletion of Mirar Pop-Up Blocker and the deletion of my network Connections (dial-up's and Internet Explorer) that caused the crash. I would be grateful if a computing.net Guru can shed some experienced light on this issue to get the Windows XP to boot-up. Many thanks and I urgently look forward to your replies and construction comments, which also may assist XP Pro users in the future. Best wishes Danny 123

Not sure what you have done but try this. If this doesn't work and hangs midstream I would suggest you remove all pci units except the video card and one stick of ram and try it. If that doesn't work swap the ram and/or the video card. How to do a system repair.--Boot from the xp cd and go past the recovery console to the install menu. Select repair the existing installation. You won't lose any data except the xp updates. Unless you have a slipstream sp1 cd you will have to d/l sp1 and all subsequent updates. You MUST have at least SP1 installed and the updates for security reasons. Be sure the firewall and A/V is active before going online as you will be susceptible to sasser and msblaster. If you don't want SP2 go to autopatcher.com and d/l SP1 and subsequent updates.

I haven't a clue what you mean by reinstalling XP but there is an XP repair and you need to set bios so that cd rom is 1st or second boot in front of hard drive, and then run the second repair request... http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

add a drive to the system. Use a boot diskette to boot to dos. If your XP file system is ntfs you will need the full version of ntfsdos so you can read your data off the hosed drive to the added drive. This will preserve your data. If you can't do a repair install of XP, and you have no backups of your data this is your choice as last resort.

Thanks per, Rich Mentzel and wanderer but still no luck. when I let xp boot by itself, it hangs with moving lights in the black xp pro boot screen then something clicks and the computer restarts inself over and over again. by changing the bios seq to boot from the xp cd-rom i get around 50 lines of white text on a black screen saying multi(0)partition(1) etc /system32. around 100 characters in total per lines but the system does not stay on long enough for me to write this down and also restarts itself. is system32 a virus?? I have a spare hard-drive - should I install win98 on this or xp pro? which o/s install would be more beneficial to retrieve the data from the original xp hdd? win98 or winxp? or winme? win2000? any more ideas? thanks awaiting your responses