Registry key help!!

Apologies if this is in the wrong topic and for the long post, but.....

I recently made a 2nd XP Home installation, on the same drive, as the 1st seemed corrupted. I left the file settings unchanged and all seemed well. I then got a blue screen issue which was due to a driver issue. I installed XP again (unchanged file system again), but this time accidently chose the option to delete the folder. I now have a fresh install, with all previous files on the drive but all previous profile and registry settings gone. I don't have any previous restore points or backups. Is there anyway that these 2 issues can be rectified?

Thanks in advance!

 

Thanks for the reply

The problem I have, is that after a new (unchanged file system) reinstall, all programs that I installed have stayed on the hard drive except for the registry keys making them unusable. Also the 5 previous user accounts (and their settings) were deleted. The folders and files on the main administrator account have been deleted but the other 4 accounts have ALL of their folders and files intact. I have a 2nd XP Home Edition installed (in a folder called WINXP) and thought I could boot from that installation and move the settings accross, but I don't seem to get an option to.

I would like to be able to recover the registry keys AND the user account settings from the 2nd XP installation.

Thanks again

 

Soryy but you seem to have mixed up several different recovery techniques.

When a program is installed Three things happen.

1) Executable files are place on the hard drive. These may be stand alone executables such as .exe files or they may be only executable by being called from another program which might be windows itself. These are usually .dll files.

2) Setup and start information files are palce on the hard drive for the program. Examples are .inf files. This information refers to the current position of the executables and needs to be in the right relative location.

3) Information is placed in the registry to allow Windows to start the program when called.

When you do a parallel installation although you can see the files in (1) above the misiing files from (2) above will probably prevent you from starting the program by copying from the original registry to satisfy (3).

Recovery processes work in order of impact

System restore replace the registry in (3) in the existing isntallation with an earlier version.

Repair install replaces the registry in (3) with an earlier version plus some windows files again in the original installation.

Parallel install installs an entirely new copy of Windows, so none of the information in (2) or (3) is present. It further changes the boot record to point to the new installation.

You have told us that unfortunately you have lost the old registry so your best bet is to follow Halo's advice.