Registry corruption

[flaminggerbil]

Just lost everything I'd written due to not selecting a sub category, nice one Tom's.

Had trouble recently with my 7200.11 Barracuda, failed on me due to the well known 7200.11 fail to detect error and so was 'repaired' by Seagate.
Since then I brought a second 7200.12 drive as a temporary replacement which would then be made into a simple second storage drive once the original was back up and running.
Since it was returned I've booted it up without issue once, but now it's returning corrupt registry errors which cant be repaired through the automatic system, also restore points are disabled due to not having 'boot protection' (?) or somesuch.

Is it possible to restore the registry through command prompt in Win7 and is it actually worth doing, or should I just give up, format it and simply run the newer drive as the boot?
That drive's given me no end of grief recently and I'm starting to lose the will to keep using it as the main.

 

[Jonmor68]

My advice would be, this early in W7, bite the bullet, backup and start again with a clean drive.
If you are going to install on the new drive, disconnect the old one first so that the boot files go on that drive independent of any other drive.
If you havn't already done it, I would make 2 partitions on your new drive, use the second partition to backup your files from the old drive.
You can then install W7 on the first partition and have all your files from the old drive, which you can format later when you reconnect it and use it for storage and backups..

 

[flaminggerbil]

Oh I already have Win7 running on the newer drive (without activation yet) as I've been using it as a temp replacement, I just couldnt be bothered to do a full re-installation of existing software / file transfers if the original drive was going to get itself up and running again.

Surely it's not possible to actually get the files from the corrupt drive as if they're both connected at the same time it'll be like trying to dual boot Win7 without it being configured at all = bad times.

 

[flaminggerbil]

Well as a last resort tried running chkdsk through the command prompt, not a single bad sector found, buggery.
Guess I'll just be giving up on it then.