Anilrgowda

i messed up need to see if there is an out
attempted to clone 1 sata hd to another using norton ghost 2003 (dang it)
ran it from os not boot disk (dang it 2)
upon reboot where the cloning process begins machine hung with hour glass
rebooted to go back into windows and it just sat there attempting to return to windows
let is set for hours. so the quest began. ghost had infact done its trick where it had put its partition on my hd and my windows installation was now d:. read several post regarding this in various places that suggested deleting that partition. i did that and and my windows installation is now c:\windows. but when i rebooted i get the error reboot and choose proper boot device. have ran bootcfg /rebuild to no avail.i can still see my windows installation when booting into recovery console. i went for broke and attempted a xp repair( not good does it ever work) it went through the copying files process and when it had to reboot a got the error so did not continue (your laughing arent u) i can still see my windows installation and indications of data still being there ini's and such but cant get by the error. the list is long with probably what i should have done but wondering is there anything i can do now.got some pretty critical data and was just trying to get the whole thing backed up. Authored

Anilrgowda

Your problem with getting "Access denied" with Recovery Console is by design; there are built-in restrictions for what you normally can do in RC. But read this article by Fred Langa on how to get around that:

Langa Letter: The OS Inside The OS - Technology News by InformationWeek


On the second page there is info on a registry edit you can use to enable the SET command in RC, which will then allow you to use the SET AllowAllPaths = True that removes the normal RC restrictions. Now, how are you going to be able to use REGEDIT on a non-booting system? One of two ways: a) mount the nonbooting hard drive as a secondary in a working XP system (as you have already tried) and then use what is called "offline registry editing" to access the registry of the bad drive. or b) use a bootable "mini-WinXP" CD like BartPE, with a plugin called RegeditPE, so that you could do the same.