stumper - dell notebook won't boot

[dbnoll03]

Hi all, my dad's Dell 3800 series notebook will not boot. He does not exactly know what happened, just that he turn it on he got the following error:

Registry info not found. Registry services may be inoperative for this session.
XMS cache problem. Registry services may be inoperative for this session.

Then Windows ME tries to load a driver for something but fails. So my next try was safe mode but it freezes before it is completely loaded.

I attempted to restore the registry by booting from a boot disk and running scan disk, but no registry error was found. Is there another way to restore the registry from a backup on the boot disk other than scan disk? Any other suggestion to get this computer booted?

Thanks all.

dbnoll03

[muno]

Scandisk doesn't scan the registry, scanreg does. But, I'm not that certain it will do any good since windows usually is able to restore the registry by itself if there's an error. Try it anyways, boot to dos and run scanreg.exe.
-M

[LadyTech]

If you are trying to fix the registry. Type this at dos prompt
scanreg /fix
this is the command to fix registry. I do not know if this will work, but, hey, it's worth a try.

good luck

[Yar1182]

Worst case senerio you can try an install in place. This should install windows without wiping out all your other files. Again this is a worsst case senerio. I haven't worked much with WinMe, but I consider it very unstable. If you do have to wipe the drive and start from scratch repartition the drive so you can have the os and aps on one and data on another. Using WinMe you "probably" will have problems again in the future.

[dbnoll03]

Thanks all. I did the scanreg thing. I forgot that it was a different program then scandisk. I havn't had to do any registry recovery at all with windows 2000 on my computer. I love stability! http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif Thanks again.

dbnoll03

[dbnoll03]

Another thought. I still don't know what cause the error message. Probably that virus called Windows...