Laptop registry error

[beeiilll]

I tried searching through the posts but didn't see anything that gave me an answer.

I have an IBM THinkpad that a person in town here asked me to take a look at. He thought that it had a hardware problem since it won't start.

He says that he "played around" (yikes) with the BIOS settings but couldn't get it to come up.

The machine goes through boot fine and goes to the Windows startup screen with the scrolling bar okay, then the screen goes blank for around a minute and then I get the error message:

 

Stop: C0000218 {Registry File Failure}

The registry cannot load the hive (file):

or its log or alternate.

It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

 

Then the machine just loops back to the power up startup screen and goes through it again.

 

Obviously this means a registry problem, but I don't have any disks or info about this computer other than it supposedly has Windows XP Pro on it.

 

Is there anyway to use my Windows XP Pro installation disk from my computer to repair the registry and get this machine to start up?

If there is can someone tell me how to go about it please? I'm a hardware person and not much up on software other than to do an installation or make settings changes.

I also just stopped smoking 5 days ago and my nerves are a little frayed at this point, so please be patient with me !!!

 

Thanks for any help that you can give me.

Bill Ellick

 

Smoke Free - 5 Days and counting !

[d3bruts1d]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/156640

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822705

[PeeWee90]

Smoke Free - 5 Days and counting !

Free smokes?

 

Good luck with that!