OK, my fault, I wasn't entering that final command properly. I was missing the space between the 'copy' and the '_' in this command
copy _registry_machine_system c:\windows\system32\config\system
, so I wasn't copying anything
I entered the command properly, and got the message that 1 file was copied, which I didn't get before.
Tried to reboot, and it wouldn't, so I tried to go back into the windows recovery console. This time, at step 9, I got "access denied" again, so I went to windows\system32\config and tried the following command again "ren system system.bak " Once again, I got the message that "a directory or file with the name system.bak already exists" I tried it again with "system.old" but got the same error message. What now?