Startup repair is not doing it's job (assuming that's the culprit)

Greetings.

I'm trying to repair my father's Thinkpad R52, running 7 x86.

I'm not sure what my father did, but upon boot, I have 4 7 OS to choose from, all of them the same name.

Regardless of which one I choose, 7 loads, then the blue splash screen appears with an error. It says something along the lines of "Startup is corrupt. 0x00000 (I forget the last values). Setup will repair after reboot." Something like that, I'm not by the laptop so I can't check.

So I attach a USB AND insert a CD, both with a 7 image on it (USB is bootable). I boot from USB, I go into 'startup repair' and this is where things don't make sense to me...

If I choose the first option to repair startup by virtue of 7's tool (startup repair), it will detect one 'root error', laptop reboots, but still, I get the initial error I mentioned upon loading the OS normally.

If I choose to repair from system image, it won't detect the CD (which has a 7 image on it) as a system image - what gives? Pissing me off.

Should I just use Knoppix to retrieve the files and reformat it? I'm leaning towards that option...

Thanks in advance

Tried using Knoppix to find files.

Will find the folders, but not the files.

Bump =)

Hi tameta

See if this will work for you http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/139576-startup-repair-infinite-loop-recovery.html

Thanks for the suggestion, but all my RegBackup files are at 0 bytes =/

"

• The DEFAULT, SAM and SECURITY files should each be about 262,000 bytes in size.
• The SOFTWARE file should be about 26,000,000 bytes.
• The SYSTEM file should be about 9,900,000 bytes.
• The file sizes presented here are approximate estimations, and may vary depending on your system. If any one of them are 0 bytes, then you should stop what you're doing now and seek an alternative method of recovering your system, because Windows cannot function with a 0-byte size registry hive."