After a meeting the other day I closed the lid on my Vista laptop to hibernate it, as is my normal practice. When I returned to my office an hour later I restarted my laptop only to be greeted by a message telling me that
Windows cannot start. The system registry is missing or corrupt.
Oooopps, thought I (or something similar). The Vista boot prompt indicated that I should insert the Vista installation DVD, reboot the computer and select Automatic Repair from the installation options. I did this and the automatic repair wizard indicated that all it could do to fix the problem was to perform a System Restore and restore the computer to a previous restore point. As there was little else I could do at this time I opted to perform the System Restore. The computer whirred away for a while then I was greeted by the following error message
System Restore failed due to an unspecified error. Access is denied. (0x80070005)
Thinking it might just be an error with the chosen restore point, I performed a System Restore with a different restore point but the same error occurred each time I tried to do a System Restore, regardless of which restore point I chose.
Five minutes with Google revealed that I was not alone in receiving this error message and that many Vista users had experienced a similar error at one time or another. I was intrigued by the access denied aspect of the error and wondered whether there was a problem with the file system that was preventing the system restore working; this seemed logical as the registry file was already corrupt. As I had a command prompt available in the Automatic Repair console I decided to perform a chkdsk against the system drive (chkdsk /X C:). chkdsk told me that it had made some changes to the drive, so I rebooted the computer and everything worked perfectly. The computer started properly and booted normally.
The odd thing was that the System Restore did seem to have worked, even though the error message claimed it hadn't, as some files and settings had been restored to the condition they were in a few days earlier. One of the posts that I stumbled across whilst Googling the issue also indicated that his System Restore had worked even though it claimed it had failed.
Now I can't guarantee that chkdsk is what fixed the problem but if you have a similar problem with System Restore when performing an Auomatic Repair it might be worth running chkdsk too.
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