One of my flatmates is running a Dell 510m laptop and is now experiencing problems on boot up.
When booting the laptop asks for Normal Mode, Safe Mode etc, I have tried both normal and safe but neither works.
A blue screen appears which I have seen before where it dumps physical memory, but at the top it says a C0000218 Registry file -
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE
- cannot be found or is corrupt.
In all my experience with 'the blue screen', after the memory dump it goes on to load normally, but this seems to just stop and do nothing (although we have left it running to see if it's perhaps just very slow).
A quick Google of the problem seems to suggest a reformat is in order, although an alternative is suggested, but me being me am not too clued up on reformats and playing with registries. Naturally i'm reluctant to do anything which could risk her losing her year of Uni work (I haven't asked yet but I doubt she backs up to removable storage!)
Is there any way of fixing this simply?
Can I restore from outside windows to it's state a few days ago?
Is there any way to reformat a Dell (I believe it has a built in restore of Shift + F11 - or something similar - when booting up?) without losing work?
Any help or suggestions will be much appreciated. Thanks.
