Edit the registry on a secondary hard drive?

[Jorsoft]

Okay, I couldn't find what I was looking for when I did a search so here it goes:
I have a customer's Sony Laptop that was extremely infected with viruses/spyware. She couldn't even log into Windows. It would start to log in and then it would automatically sign her out. We've cleaned out most of the crap from her hard drive but we still can't get into Windows XP. One of my tech's has determined (don't ask me how) that XP's registry is haivng some issues with certain keys/entries and that if he can edit it and fix the keys it'll be fine. However, we can't get into Windows to run regedit. If we take the lappy's hard drive and stick it into a desktop machine as a slave (we do it all the time) how can we edit the registry on it?

 

[office politics]

move drive, backup data, rebuild.

 

[Jorsoft]

Obviously that's the easiest solution but there are two problems:
#1-Our customer might not be able to find her restore disc
#2-If we do that we'd end up having to charge her more money (company rules) so we're trying to do this first. Anyone know how?

 

[office politics]

rebuilding the registry will take a lot of time and knowledge.

best wishes.

 

[Osiris]

Obviously that's the easiest solution but there are two problems:
#1-Our customer might not be able to find her restore disc
#2-If we do that we'd end up having to charge her more money (company rules) so we're trying to do this first. Anyone know how?

do you have any recovery tools such as ERD Commander?

 

[Jorsoft]

I don't think we have ERD Commander, I've never even heard of it. Where can I get it? Is it even free?

 

[Osiris]

http://www.winternals.com/Products/ErdCommander/

Its helped me out a lot in many ways...

Its not free on that site but.....

 

[SkyHi]

Have you tried safe mode?

(*looks around ready to be slapped*)

Steve