On Nov 6, 2009, at 3:31 PM, Kai Schaetzl maillists@conactive.com wrote:
Boris Epstein wrote on Fri, 6 Nov 2009 14:21:39 -0500:
If I have a dual-boot machine (Linux and Windows) would I have any good tools under Linux that would allow me to look at the content of the Windows boot partition, administer it, clean up the registry, remove viruses if any, etc? The Windows installation seems to be so defective as to be quite useless so I am trying to think of a good strategy for dealing with the situation.
Why would you want to do that? If there's valuable data you can get them off the partition with Linux (CentOS can mount NTFS) and then reinstall your Windows to that partition. Actually the data on the partition should stay unharmed by a reinstallation or repair installation (you can do a repair installation from the install media). When reinstalling Windows you may lose bootability to Linux and reestablish grub. There are lots of articles/tutorials on the net if you need help on that.
Reinstallation repairs reinit the registry which borks all the applications installed, so it is always better to just reinstall.
-Ross