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W i n d o w s   9 8

Extracting data from an old Registry backup

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During a recent clean reinstallation of 
Win98se I discovered that I needed some data
from the Registry. I had backed-up the 
registry from my previous incarnation of 
W98 (I'd backed up system.ini and user.ini 
amongst other things). However I cannot 
read the data in either - they are not 
simple text files. Is there an application 
I can use to read the data and recover the
reg keys I need?


== How to do it

1.	Reboot to MS-DOS

2.	At DOS Prompt I typed SMARTDRV

3.	Then I typed REGEDIT /?
	This gave me a HELP list of the 
	REGEDIT syntax

4.	I then typed it again but 
	redirected the output to the 
	printer:

	REGEDIT /? >PRN

5.	I now had a hard copy to scribble
	on.

6.	I had unzipped my old backups of 
	the SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT files to
	C:\REG and temp directory I'd created 
	in Windows98se

7.	I knew that the Reg Key I wanted was
	at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\XYZ

8.	I discovered that to export a 
	particular key you provide the 
	following information

        REGEDIT [/L:system] [/R:user] /E filename3 [regpath1]
    
	[/L:system] and [/R:user] involved
	giving the full-path of the 
	SYSTEM and USER files;

	*filename3* is the name of the reg
	file you want to export to;
    
	and *regpath1* is the registry key
	you want to export (the default is 
	the whole registry)

9.	So I typed: 

	REGEDIT /L:C:\REG\SYSTEM.DAT /R:C:\REG\USER.DAT /E FILE.REG HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\XYZ

10.	And Regedit exported only the 
	registry key I wanted to a .reg
	file successfully.

11.	I rebooted to Windows98se 
	successfully, and the .reg file I'd 
	created contained the information 
	I wanted.