Hello, I am trying to help a friend who knows even less than I do about electronics of any kind. (Scary, I know). But I know I can do this if someone would kindly give me the steps for restoring a Toshiba Satellite A80-S178TD to the factory configuration. I know, sounds simple enough right? But first, there the teeny-tiny little issue of whatever my friend did to it that would cause:

STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure)
The registry cannot load the hive (file): \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE or its log alternate. It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

I don't know what that means but it didn't look good, and here's the best part: no backup or installation software.

Having only my own previous experiences of screwing up a machine to go on, I was imagining that maybe this error will magically fix itself if we tried the restore process. I did this very successfully on my Dell laptop w/Vista recently.

This was originally her son's laptop, and she has been computer-curious, so she was using it to learn on; (Yeah, I know). I showed her how to clean & defrag, and clean out the browser; short-cut menus (I think that's where I went wrong with her). All basic stuff. Told her if you don't know where you are click cancel and stay out of it!

So if anyone out there can help and would be so inclined, many thanks and good karma points.

Configuration: Windows XP
Internet Explorer 7.0