Here's a new one for me... A friend of mine had his video card die out on him, and he repeatedly rebooted the machine manually by holding the power switch down for 5 seconds. I changed out the video card, now here's the deal:

Windows XP gives a BSOD error at startup saying "Registry Error" - this error occurs BEFORE you can access the boot menu to get to safe mode, so you can't get into safe mode.

When you run the recovery console from the Windows XP CD, after you select which version of windows you want to logon to, guess what? "Registry Error" BSOD!

I'll be trying some of my alternate boot CD's to see if I can manually backup the registry and restore a working copy from the "repair" directory - will let you folks know how it goes.

But if any of you have run into this problem and have a solution - please let me know!

I don't see how XP could throw errors prior to an attempt at Safe Mode as XP hasn't even started to load at this point.

Try booting into Safe Mode by repeatedly tapping the F8 key after your BIOS POST but before Windows starts.

Where in the boot process does the error arise and what is the verbatim error?

All that being said a Repair Install might be the most expedient solution.

http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Trust me, I tried the F8 key thing... problem is that the BSOD "Registry Error" comes up *before* you can get to the "Safe Mode" menu. I'll post the exact error message in a couple of hours when I get back to that machine. Will check on the Repair Install option as well.

Thanks for the input!

You could try holding the CTRL key rather than F8 as one option.

Unless the BIOS is throwing that error (and it has nothing to do with a registry) you are running past Safe Mode options. Again this Menu precedes the booting of XP.

Another issue might be "which version of Windows"? How many versions are on this computer?

What do you use as a boot selector?