I can't believe I'm about to mention a bootable floppy disk in 2008...
But if Windows won't boot properly (even in Safe Mode) and the CDROM drive doesn't work and it's too old to boot from USB and there is a floppy disk drive...
This site offers a free NTFS4DOS with write capabilities for personal use. Perfect for manually copying the restore registry files.
http://www.free-av.com/en/download/11/avira_ntfs4dos_personal.html
tags: ntfs, boot, recovery, registry, windows