Help! Reboot Loop

[puggit]

My faithful desktop has decided to go down. Just as I reached over to powerup the laptop it rebooted. No new hardware installs for months - I did clean off downloader Trojan last night, but have booted successfully since.

Its now stuck in a loop, it reboots as Win2000 Pro finishes counting the dots from left to right on the splash screen.

Safe mode and last known good are no good. Win2000 repair says it can't find a Windows install. It has once run chkdsk (about 4th reboot).

I have managed to capture the Stop message:

crappy flaky OS said:

STOP: c0000218 (registry file failure) The registry cannot load the hive (file); systemrootsystem32configSOFTWARE or its log or alternate It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

HDD failure?

I do have a one month old backup - but I'd rather repair if possible. I don't had an ERD

Edited cos I had the stop code wrong - not the best digital photo!

>>> Edited by puggit on Saturday 17th April 12:30

[puggit]

Bit more info:

My winntsystem32configsoftware file is 0 bytes. Can I assume I've lost my HKLMsoftware key from the registry?

[marlboro]

If you have a Win2K cd you could boot from that and try the recovery option.

[puggit]

marlboro said:

If you have a Win2K cd you could boot from that and try the recovery option.

Nope - it couldn't find the OS

I'm rebuilding now, about to restore from the old backup. It's only the OS that's old, all the applications/data are stored elsewhere

[psypher]

With win2k can you not boot to command prompt and type scanreg or scanreg /restore which i believe gives you an option to replace with a previous backup (i think theres upto 10 from memory which win2k does automatically)

edit : after googling it seems it win98/me that has this feature (been using xp to long it seems!)

>> Edited by psypher on Saturday 17th April 19:32