We had a brief power outage shutting down our computers. In an attempt to boot up my wife's computer we came up with a blue screen with the following message:
Stop:c0000218{Registry file failure}Registry cannot load the hive(file):
\systemroot\system32\config\default or its log alternative
It is corrupt,absent,or not writable.

What do I do now? I hope you can help me.

I assumed you are using XP from the error code, first try booting from the XP CD and then choose Repair, then run a CHKDSK on the drive, it could just be a simple case of file corruption causing the hive to died.
If that failed, you can try using something like Ubuntu to boot the system with and then manually copy out the last System-restored hives and manually replacing them but this is not as easy as it sound if you have never done this before.

you might even try safe mode and see if you have a restore point to go back to
M

it's corrupted os, try to repair using it's windows xp cd.. hope it works.

I appreciate all you guys trying to help. I've tried most everything you've suggested to no avail. I even went to Dell and got a procedure to repair the registry and accessed the recovery console and entered all the commands. IT rebooted and it seemed the more I did the slower it got. I think that I will remove the HD and install it in an external enclosure and back up my important files on my other computer and do a clean reinstall of the OS.

I appreciate all you guys trying to help. I've tried most everything you've suggested to no avail. I even went to Dell and got a procedure to repair the registry and accessed the recovery console and entered all the commands. IT rebooted and it seemed the more I did the slower it got. I think that I will remove the HD and install it in an external enclosure and back up my important files on my other computer and do a clean reinstall of the OS.

sounds like a good idea. You may not be able to access them if you have username/passwords on them. In this instance, you may be best to run BartPE to gain access to the files (you will need somewhere to save them to pre inserted into the computer, BARTPE runs from a CD)

Or I have written a little script that resets all user permissions/passwords for locked files and folders. It is still young, and has a bug or two, but will do the job. It runsbest in Win7, but still should work OK in XP now. It is the ONLY software that I know of on the internet today that does this job for free. I don't have a link, because I am still working on the bugs before I release it.

It also solves the "path too long" error, if anyone is interested.

I thought I'd better check in and give you an update on what I have done and where I am now. I ordered a HD enclosure and installed the drive in it and plugged it into my laptop and gained access to the contents.After copying the important items to CD's I reinstalled the drive into the pc and did a clean reinstall of Windows. Did not fix the problem. The computer was so slow I couldn't do anything with it so I booted install setup again did a repair run reinstalling the files. Only slightly better. Then I remembered I had another HD that was previously installed in the pc. It was ok. I had just changed it out to this one because of the larger storage capacity. I switched them out. Problem solved! I booted up quickly. fast as new. It wasn't the OS after all. I had checked the HD using CHKDSK and Seatools bootable Iso cd and it had passed. There's just a lot I don't understand. Do you suppose that it would ok to put HD back in the external enclosure and use it for backup storage?

Do you suppose that it would ok to put HD back in the external enclosure and use it for backup storage?

Throw it out.

It is good that you have run CHKDSK on it, this can help, but slow load times (seek) on a HDD mean only one thing. Impending HDD failure.

It might be interesting to download a trial copy of this program, http://disk-monitor.com/ and see what it thinks of the drive, but the truth is, your HDD is dying. If it was mine, I wouldn't use it again.

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