Sorry, I was reading the other threads but none of them really can help me. I'm currently using my school's computer, but what happened was I was using my computer last night and following the Cnet.com tutorial for speeindg up windows. So, I followed it and decided to download EasyCleaner to clean my registry, and it deleted some entries, then I restarted my computer and the first time it was a blank black screen, so i turned it off and reloaded it and this time for some reason it worked and i went back to using my computer. when i was shutting it off before going to bed, I restarted it and this time the black screen loaded again...I got to see my Sony Vaio screen with the Pentium 4 logo in the corner and then it becomes a black screen with a blinking cursor. I restarted it again and this time i maganed to access some BIOS menu screen, I did not change anyhting there but I did see that I had two botting devices or something and 512 memory. So i left and restarted again this time I acessed some screen that asked me which boot device and I did not know what to pick and I just picked the first one. and then it went back to a black blinking screen, I did the same for the 2nd option and it was the same thing too. Eventually, I gave up left the computer on and went to sleep, when i woke up it was on the "SONY RECOVERY" something, and it allowed me the option to restore my sony computer back to the way it was "factory settings". However, I don't want to do this since I would lose almost 2 years worth of essays...school documents music everything...right now I'm at school sinec I don't have any other computer to use. I haven't pressed f8 or w/e to access the safe mode screen yet, I'm going to go home later and try it...is there any other way I can fix my computer, or what exactly is wrong with it...


Also, is there any way I can take my harddrive out and make it an external one, plug it into another computer and copy files from there to another harddrive. Put my original harddrive back into my computer and just reformat it all and then access the 2nd harddirve Would it mess up the other persons computer? also, I do NOT have a Windows XP disk or anything.

Thank you so much.

It's likely that the registry cleanup cleaned away some essential system registry values that caused the problem you are having now. From my experience, most registry cleaners are not reliable, and it's best not to use them unless a trusted expert recommends them. Registry is not something to be messed around with, you should always do a backup of the registry before you edit any part of it.

I'm not sure if this will work, but you can try to go into safe mode and install windows recovery console. Have a look at these articles: Description of Windows Recovery Console & How to install Windows Recovery Console

Hope this helps.

LT