Thanks for your time and efort, i figured it must been damaged beyand recovery when i saw that hive only had 4 sub keys in it in comparesone to hive from my desk top i will try to see if i can use other hive and do in place ripairs maybe i be lucky enoth to get it working re instaliing windows from scratch always a teadios task and then all the software to be re install as well, just 1 quation do you know what can posebly corupt hive to thise extend ?
No problem. Allow me to give you a very oversimplifed and ficticious example. Windows only sees four keys. In reality, the rest still remain in the file, but are not visible to Windows. I was trying to make them visible. The data has not been lost, just no longer available.
Let's assume that 00 is a special character which terminates a file. As soon as this character is reached, no further reading of the file is performed.
Now imagine a string of hexadecimal data:
8B 5F DE 56 01 E3 19 5C 72 F9 00
Windows sees this as:
8B 5F DE 56 01 E3 19 5C 72 F9
Now let's assume we have a single point corruption:
Old:
i 8B 5F DE 56 01 E3 19 5C 72 F9
New:
8B 5F DE 56 00 E3 19 5C 72 F9
Now Windows sees it as:
8B 5F DE 56
The data
E3 19 5C 72 F9 has not been lost, it just does not show up. There is only one tiny bit of real corruption. But on the surface, there appears to be massive corruption of over 50% of the data. There isn't, but that is what it looks like.
A very similar thing is happening here with you. I can see in raw binary format an almost perfect COMPONENTS hive with very little corruption.
Unfortunately, somewhere within lies a most tiny corruption which is throwing Windows off the rest of the file, hence only 4 keys show up. You only have a tiny corruption, but it was a very serious one.
I have spent ages trying to track down potentially a single misplaced 0 or 1, but was unable to find it to fix it. I am very sorry
Anyway, it could be anything from dying hardware, RAM quite possible, to just unluckiness. The vast majority of Windows Update issues I see are not caused by failing hardware. If you want me to tell you how to check hardware, I would be more than happy to, but I do not suspect it is necessary, unless you have other problems indicative of hardware failure. I think hardware failure is not likely here.
Richard