I've got a Dell Vista machine - Inspiron 1720 laptop specifically - which I'm 99% certain came with no media, just the recovery partition.
It's now refusing to boot, saying the system registry is corrupt. The standard F8 boot menu doesn't seem to provide a way to access the recovery partition, neither does BIOS from what I can see. None of the options I can access seem to do anything useful, I just get the message about the corrupt system registry instantly.
Have I lost a critical disc? Am I looking in the wrong place? Or is there anything you could suggest for how I can access this data and get the machine booting again?