sony vaio boot problems

[surfboy]

hiya everyone
I have a sony vaio fs415e and it will not boot up. I was uninstalling a programme and lost power. When i started up again the system would not boot properly. It reaches a certain point then restarts. I have the error message
c.0000218 registry file failure, cannot load the hive
/systemroot/system/config/software

I have done a bit of searching and i have found the answer to the problem on the microsoft site. It says I have to boot from the XP cd and then repair registry files. The problem is the vaio came with XP already installed and no bootable cd copy. I can access the vaio system recovery software (i also made backups of these as recommended by sony but it didnt mention XP backup) but all i can do from here is recover the system while losing all the data on the c drive which i dont want to do. Can I use make a bootable XP disk from another vaio and use that to access the registry files on my computer? Any suggestons/help gratefully accepted!
Thanks
Lee

[compartsol]

What you need to do is take out the HDD and plug it outside of the machine on an enclosure and then plug it in to the usb port of another computer and that way you can pick what you need to save and then proceed to re-run your O/S