Running Windows from Ubuntu

Question

I have a Windows Vista problem I'm trying to resolve with Ubuntu, but I'm not all that familiar with how to work one with the other. Vista went into an update loop while my wife was booting up our Acer Aspire 5515 a few days ago. Screen is stuck on installing Part 3 of 3 at 0% for over 5 hours. Can't boot into Safe Mode with command line, System Repair refuses to come up, so no System Restore or command line or anything else. Of course, the laptop came without any installation discs to boot from, and the recovery disks want to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows. Then I remember I have an older Ubuntu CD I was playing around with years ago. I can boot from that, but because of the "unclean" state left by the failed update, I have to force mount the Acer disk. So now I can see the drive. I renamed the pending.xml file in winsxs as recommended from MS Support, but that hasn't solved the problem. How do I run Windows commands from Ubuntu, e.g., System Restore so I can roll this puppy back to an earlier, happier time, or regedit so I can delete some of the keys also mentioned in the MS page? Thanks for any insight offered.

Answer 1

The chntpw tool has limited registry editing capabilities. I don't believe it comes with Ubuntu by default, you'll have to install it by clicking the link above, or opening a terminal and runing the following command:

sudo apt-get install chntpw

Once you get the tool installed, you'll have to tell it which registry file to edit by entering chntpw <full registry file path> in the terminal. These are the physical files where some of the registry information is stored:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software - WINDOWS/System32/config/software
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System - WINDOWS/System32/config/system
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER - <path to user's folder>/NTUSER.DAT

Wine comes with a registry editor, but I believe this is only for Wine's registry and not any other Windows registry. I have an XP partition for gaming and could not open it through wine's editor. If you want to try this approach, enter wine regedit through a terminal window.