Restoring Registry of Windows XP

Restoring Registry of Windows XP

Few days back, my Windows XP got infected by a few viruses. Using infected pen drives seemed to be the reason. One particularly pesky virus was a script that started everytime I logged on even when I deleted the .vbs file manually. So I opened up regedit.exe and deleted every registry entry containing that file name. Bad move.

Next time I rebooted, I got the Welcome Screen, which I usually bypass. Clicking on my user name was not good enough to log in. It’d display, Loading User Settings and then come back to login screen without getting to desktop. I have a dual boot system with Linux as other OS (Using ntfs-3g it’s possible to read-write NTFS partitions from Linux). I could do most work on Linux but not gaming. I needed that XP back, reinstalling was not an option.

So….booted into Linux and fired up Google to look for some solution. There were many such cases but only one solution was applicable in my case, that is..restoring the registry.

There are many ways to restore registry one being using Windows Recovery Console. But that’s slow as it involved booting using XP cd and running commands to copy/rename files from crappy command line of Windows. Why use Windows command line, when you can read-write NTFS partitions from Linux itself!! :p

Here are the steps:-