The other day I was on my computer and I was going about my normal business. Then the computer froze up, so I gave it a few minutes but alas, nothing. So I gave it a few more minutes and it had absolutely crashed, even my music had stopped playing. So I hit the reset switch. When it boots back up now I get to the Windows loading bootscreen and then it blue screens and then shuts itself off. I have booted it up again in safe mode, but the same result.

I then pulled out my Windows XP CD to see if I could do a repair on it.
So I boot to the CD, I press Enter to install Windows, I press F8, It then says it's checking for previous versions of XP, it then blue screens saying that there is a registry error.
I've also tried repairing it, that also blue screens. So the hard drive cannot be accessed at all from the Windows CD.

So to check if it may be the hard drive I pulled out an old 40GB hard drive, installed windows on it and set my main hard drive as a slave. My main hard drive is fine, I can access all my files.

Now I know I could just reformat the hard drive from the cmd, however I do want to.

I want to re-install windows onto the main hard drive (which is set to slave) without loosing files. I have read about winnt32.exe, might this help? I do not know how to go about the parameters.

Please, any suggestions or ideas would help.

Yes
Run CheckDisk from Starting with your Windows CD
Then selecting the first R prompt for the Recovery Console
Log on to your Administrator account ie Press 1
Then once you have pressed 1, then press Enter
Then on the command line write:
[B]chkdsk c: /r[/B]
Restart once finished

Once complete, either start the Repair of Windows again
Or see if Windows actually starts (Last Known Good Configuration, would be good, from using the F8 key at system startup)

Thanks for the speedy reply.
I just tried it now but it Blue Screens. I select 1 and then when I press Enter it Blue Screens.
I get a REGISTRY_ERROR 0x00000051
Is there any other way to install windows?

You cannot get a Registry error booting from the Windows CD (?)

Well the CD boots but when you select the drive to log on to (C:/Windows) It blue screens.

Please run [URL="http://www.techspot.com/vb/post653029-21.html"]Memtest [/URL]on your Ram

i've got the same problem as above...

windows crashed
reinstall/recovery console gives BSOD
REGISTRY_ERROR
0x00000051 (0x00000003, 0x00000001, 0x00003000, 0xE125B030)

found something similar at techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?t=47400 (sry cant post urls due to low post count >.<), everything from there is same with me except those error parameters...

also i did a memtest as you requested, 0 errors found... help please? ~_~

You need to create a New Thread, just for you
Read here on how to do that: [url]http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic114336.html[/url]

Although the same error numbers it is possible that this is a program such as AntiVirus or Firewall or some other specific program that you are running
Therefore it's not the same

nah too lazy ...
i just wanted some bypass to get to a command console which i found using Bart's PE
thx anyway

btw: first crash was caused by power surge which corrupted some system files on hard restart...