>don penlington wrote:

>
> 1. When I open Regedit, am I looking at ALL the data contained in both
> User.dat and System.dat?

Yes, this is all the data contained in user.dat and system.dat with some
dynamic data that windows enters.

> 2. If I export "My computer" using Regedit, is this identical to making
> copies of User.dat and System.dat?  There must be some other
> stuff as well,
> because if I do this, the Regedit export is larger than the sum of these 2
> files, in my case by .5 Mb.  Which files are represented by this extra
> data?  The config and ini files seem too small to account for this missing
> mass.
>
When you export the whole registry, you are exporting one file in a .reg
format.  It is still a combination of both user.dat and system.dat.  The
reason for the size difference is that the .reg file is a text file you can
edit and understand.  The user.dat and system.dat are system files like
command.com.  If you open one, it is just a lot of code gibberish.

>
> 3.  Could I just make a copy of those files, rename them with a .reg
> extension, and restore the complete registry by double-clicking?  If the
> answer is yes, I assume that the restoration won't be effective until the
> next reboot, as I believe that all this data is loaded into memory at
> bootup. I guess that's why a substantial portion of memory is used just to
> keep Windows running.

Yes, you can restore missing keys, or change current ones, but what it does
is merge into the current registry.  This is done by exporting
HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.   If you have a corrupt section
that is not included in your reg file, it won't do you any good.  You can
not copy user.dat to user.reg - like I said, they are diffferent formats.
>
> 4. In Win 95B, I have 2 files in my root directory--io.dos and io.sys. Is
> this normal? Both are identical size.  Although they are in binary form,
> the contents appear at a glance to be identical.  Are they both necessary?
> If not, which should I delete?

Yes, both are essential and should remain there.  IO.SYS is a windows system
file, and IO.DOS allows for booting to your previous operating system.

Regards,
Dan

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