I'm receiving the error message upon trying to start my PC "Stop: C000218 (Reg File Failure) The reg cannot load the hive or its log or alternate. It is corrupt, absent, or not writable. Beginning dum of physical memory. Physical memory dump complete." I've tried putting the XP CD in upon load and restarting to start the Recovery Console, but I can't access anything...it still just flashes that error message and restarts without loading the CD. PLEASE reply with any suggestions. Thanks Trisha

Is the bios set to boot from the cd before ide 0 and are you hitting enter when it asks "do you want to boot from the cd". You have 5 seconds to do so. Please post back within 24 hours or I will delete the post from my follow up list. Thanks. It would be a courtesy if you would post back and let us know if the fix worked or not.

Your going to need the recovery cd that came with your computer Trisha . Your Physcial memory core has been trashed by a corruption in the registry and putting the windows xp disc in won't do it . You need a clean wipe of the drive and start over. Sorry its not better news . Unless you have a backup file disc made that will save all of what you had on the computer otherwise its gone.

insert the xp cd, reboot the pc and start pressing 'F12' repeatedly until you get a boot menu. choose to boot from cd, then run recovery console. type 'chkdsk /r' to run a checkdisk to possibly fix the issue, or run 'diskpart' and delete the partitions, then reinstall windows. if all else fails - probably a bad hard drive

Per's suggestion sounds the best to me. You have to be quick to boot from the CD, Otherwise it tries the hard drive.

Just do a repair install from the XP CD and that should sort things out. -Andrew