Greetings. I'm having 2 seperate problems here... and have been researching both, but I am unable to come to a concrete solution. I am hoping that someone else here can give me a hand.

I have a Dell Diminson 2400 pc. It was recently reformatted and Win XP Pro was installed on it with no problems. It worked fine. Then last week, the power went off during a storm. When it came back on, the computer will not boot up correctly (even in safe mode) and gives me this error message:

The registry cannot load the hive file /systemroot/system32/config/software or its log or alternate. It is corrupt, abscent, or not writable. Beginning dump of physical memory.

I researched that error and found out a way to fix it using the Win XP disc and the repair utility, however when I stick the Win XP Pro disc in the drive and try to boot from it I get this msg:

INF file txtsetup.sif is corrupt or missing, status 47872

Researching this error I found it could be memory related, but using a memory scanner on a utilities boot cd disc, it found no errors during the approx 3 hour memory scan.

So, now I have 2 errors, with seemingly no idea how to deal with them at the same time. There are hard disc wipe/erase programs on the utilities disc. Could I erase the hd with that utility and then get a fresh Win XP Pro install to work? I'd like to not have to lose what's on the hd, but if that is what it takes I'll bite the bullet. Any help at all will be most greatly and generously appriciated. Thank you very much in advance!!!!

when I stick the Win XP Pro disc in the drive and try to boot from it

How did you try to boot?

In order to boot from the CD, you need to ensure the CD is the first boot device in the BIOS Setup Menu.

Then when you reboot, early in the boot process, you will be prompted to press a key to boot to CD. Only then will it boot to the CD. If you are not paying attention, the prompt will time-out, and the BIOS will go to the second boot device, such as the HD to look for a boot sector.

Is that how you tried to boot to CD?

Thanks for the reply.

I have the cdrom set to boot first, and it asks me to press any key to boot from cd. It will boot the utilities disc, but will not boot the Win XP Pro disc.

And is that a real Windows XP Pro retail disk, or is a Dell Recovery disk?

It's an XP retail disc. The computer is second hand, and the seller did not have the Dell discs that came with it. I put this copy of XP Pro on it a few months back, and it's ran fine up until this point.

Hmmm, don't know - the power hit may have done more damage than just a corrupt Windows - another opportunity for me to say again, "all computers should be on a good UPS".

Is the date/time and other information in the BIOS Setup Menu correct?

The bios looks to be fine, date and time are correct.

The thing is - I know how to fix each problem individually... but having them both occur at the same time, that's what driving me crazy.

Well, I don't know what to tell you from here - perhaps you might do well to install that drive into a second computer as a slave, repartition if necessary and reformat from there. Then reinstall the drive and try to install Windows again.

Check first how your computer behaves if you disable the hd (from BIOS or by taking out the ide cable) and boot from XP CD.