At 23:03 06/11/00, Linda wrote:
>I've also been backing it up on disk with the Emergency Rescue Utility
>someone here recommended.  But if I needed to use it I would have no
>idea what to do. Can anyone tell me??? How do you restore your computer
>to an older version of the registry???


Hi Linda

Keeping in mind Jim's comments about what replacing the registry does,
if you do need to replace your registry with a copy you created using
ERU, you need to do the following:

Boot the computer to Command Prompt Mode instead of normal Windows.
You can either do this by booting from a Windows Start Up diskette
or by booting from hard disk and bringing up the Boot Menu before
the normal Windows GUI (Graphical User Interface) finishes loading.

When you first see "Starting Windows 98" on the screen, you have
only a second or two to hit F8 and bring up the Boot Menu. (If you
don't hit F8 in time, the regular Win98 GUI will boot. Try again!)
This applies to Win95 as well as Win98.

When you see the Boot Menu, scroll down to "Command Prompt Mode"
and hit <Enter>. It won't take long before you see the DOS prompt.

You want to run the program ERD.EXE. This is a program created when
you ran the Emergency Repair Utility (ERU) to make a backup. It will
be located wherever you told ERU to put the backed up files. It might
be on a floppy disk or it might be on your hard drive.

I always put it on the hard drive because I figured that if the hard
drive failed, restoring the registry wouldn't help anyway.

Suppose ERD.EXE is on your hard drive. At the C: prompt, type

C:\ERD\ERD.EXE

and hit enter. (If it's not in C:\ERD, then you should know where to
look beforehand.)

If you saved your repair information to a floppy diskette, put
the diskette in the floppy drive and type "Dir A:" (without quotes)
to look for ERD.EXE. (It might be in a subfolder on A:, maybe
in A:\ERD\, and you would have to type "CD \ERD" to get into that
folder. Then you would run ERD.EXE. (Actually, you don't even have
to type the .EXE, just type ERD and hit <enter>.)

Anyway, once you find and run ERD.EXE, you're on your way. A menu will
appear where you can choose to backup just the registry (the two files
user.dat and system.dat) or any combination of the system files
which ERU backs up. Please note that you must have all these files
present on your hard drive for ERD.EXE to work.

These files are C:\autoexec.bat, C:\config.sys, C:\command.com,
C:\io.sys, C:\msdos.sys, C:\WINDOWS\protocol.ini, C:\WINDOWS\system.ini,
C:\WINDOWS\win.ini, C:\WINDOWS\user.dat, and C:\WINDOWS\system.dat.
If you don't have C:\autoexec.bat or C:\config.sys for example, ERD
will hang while it looks for them. If this were to happen, you would
need to exit ERD by hitting <Ctrl><Alt><Del>...which causes a reboot.
At that point you would have to put fake copies of these files in
their places to satisfy ERD.EXE. The thing is that ERD.EXE expects to
find these files present and if it doesn't, it just stops working. It
doesn't matter what's in these files...ERD will overwrite them with the
versions it saved when you ran the ERU program from within Windows.

By the way, you could use ERU to keep many different copies of the
registry on your hard drive in case of trouble. I used to rename my
ERD folder to ERD1 or ERD2 when I created a new ERD backup. All you
would need to do would be to boot to DOS, find the ERD2 folder (for
example) and run the ERD.EXE which was in that folder. That would
restore the registry saved in that folder.

I used to make a backup of the registry before I installed any major
program in case it should cause problems. I ended up having about
15 backups in folders \ERD1, \ERD2, \ERD3, etc., arranged by date.
I kept these in one folder that I called \ERDS.

You might even try booting to DOS and running ERD just for practice.
You could make a copy of your registry one day using ERU and then
restore it for practice. Or you could run ERD after booting to DOS
but not actually restore anything. (You can quit ERD before doing
anything.) In an emergency, it's a whole lot less scary running ERD
if you've done it at least once before.

I don't run Win9X anymore. To make a backup now, I just copy my
whole Win2000 system partition to another hard drive. It helps to have
lots of drives with lots of free space now that drives are cheap!

Regards,
Bill

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