On Wednesday, January 19, 2000 12:06 AM, "Graylady" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:


After volunteering to help a friend restore a badly corrupted install of
Win98, I installed his hard disk on another computer as a slave and managed
to save all his data including Outlook Express, Favorites (IE5) etc. For
safety's sake I included both system.dat and user.dat in order to
import/export the proper keys to restore his mail settings. Suddenly I
realized I had no way to access the corrupted disk's registry settings as it
was installed as a slave. Perhaps someone could suggest a way to capture
certain Reg settings from a non active disk.

Gary -- I have never attempted do this personally <g> but here are some
"reversed" engineered ideas which "may" work if the following conditions are
met:

(1) if this drive is still available and you haven't "fdisk" or "reformatted
the media, try resetting the jumpers (if applicable) and install into your
computer and set it as "master" if other drives are attached.

(2) since you didn't mentioned in your original post if the hard drive had
crashed or had been repartitioned, etc., I am of the very humble opinion
that the data "may" still be intact since you are attempting to install it
as a slave drive on another machine. The following utilities "may" help do
what you are attempting to do or "they" may not.

As long as you haven't lost a .dll file or get a VXD error, you can usually
get your system back up. The first utility is actually a dos command called
"restreg.bat". Just boot your system to a dos prompt and type in
"restreg.bat" do not type the hyphens. This will restore your registry to
last bootable copy. If this doesn't work,  start thinking re-installation.
The second utility is a handy program that Microsoft doesn't say much about.
Its included with Windows 95 but not Windows 98.This program will work with
both version but it doesn't work with any Windows systems prior to Windows
95.  ERU short for "Emergency Recovery Utility". This handy program will
make a backup of all your system files including the registry, autoexec.bat,
config.sys and others. Just unzip this program to your hard drive in a
folder that you have created called "eru". Once you have it on your hard
drive you can click on the eru.exe and follow the prompts. You can save the
system files to a floppy which is the default or click on other and it will
default to a directory called ERD. I suggest running this program while your
computer is stable and as you add new software and hardware, run it again.
Always wait to make sure that the software or hardware that you installed is
running good before you overwrite the files that you have already saved.
Please note that if you run  ERU when you first setup windows and installed
software after running  ERU, you have to restore your system. ERU will only
restore what was installed when you last ran it. This utility is so easy to
use even a novice can use it. Here's how to use ERU to recover your backup
files:

  1. Boot your system to a dos prompt

  2. type "cd\ERD" (ERD being the directory that the files were copied to.)
(Do not type the hyphens). Then hit the enter key.

  3. Now type "ERD.EXE" and hit enter. Follow the prompts and reboot your
computer once it has restored your system files. If your only problem was
corrupted system files you should be back up and running again.

  4. Last but not least. Always use a virus program. I hope this helps. :-)

Walter R. Worth
[log in to unmask]

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