Need help with finding my old registry

[Buddabudda]

Hi everyone,

I installed a new hard drive and slaved my old one. Problem is my wife tossed the jewel
case to my half-life cd and I need to recover my cd key from my old registry. The problem is regedit only seems to access my Windows registry on my new drive. Any ideas on accessing my old windows registry on my slaved (non-boot) drive without swapping out to boot from it?

Thanks =)

 

[Buddabudda]

Please? Anyone?

 

[JW]

you can export your old registry file(s) to a text file and then search for the key from there.

example= at the command prompt:

regedit /l:c:\backup\system.dat /e c:\temp\system.txt

the /L is to specify location of the file. /E is the export switch, followed by the name of the output text file.

let us know how it goes.

-jw

 

[Buddabudda]

Thanks JW,

I'll give it a go!

Thanks again 8)

 

[Buddabudda]

Well, it's not exporting that file. by defaulting to c:\backup\system.dat is that assuming I have a file off the root directory named backup? I'm a tad confused there. In my case I'm trying to pull from my slaved D: drive to my C: new master drive. Doesn't sound like I can physically find the file and use edit to figure it out. Does the current registry contain the .reg extention?

Thanks for the help.

 

[Buddabudda]

Well, is there anyway to directly view the user.dat file?

 

[JW]

point to the location of your old registry files.

for Win9x, these are two hidden files in your windows directory, named SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT. so, with your setup, sounds like your old files may be at d:\windows\system.dat and d:\windows\user.dat.

plug this into the command I mentioned earlier to export each of them into plain text files that you can open in Notepad and search for the key you are looking for.

-jw

 

[Buddabudda]

Thanks JW,

was just about to rip out the drives and boot from the old one for regedit. I'll update later =)

 

[Buddabudda]

Well just got home and tried it. It pauses but nothing is showing up in my c:\Temp directory..

Here's the syntax I used....

regedit /l c:\windows\system.dat /e c:\temp\system.txt

Anything wrong here? I feel like such a novice.

 

[Buddabudda]

I meant to say

regedit /l d:\windows\system.dat etc..

 

[Motorheader]

They are in the C:\windows\sysbckup directory.

They end in .cab. There are usually 5 of them.

You can run scanreg /? to see about extracting ( use carefully ), or use

extract command ( extract /? will give you the syntax ).

This should give you access to a system.dat file with an old key.

 

[Buddabudda]

Ok, they are transferd out of the cab files but are still system.dat and user.dat files. How do you look at their content? Notepad gives a bunch of squares.

 

[Buddabudda]

Thanks for all the help guys, this is really helping me. I'm a lot further than I was =)

 

[Buddabudda]

Well, I extracted the cab files from that backup directory but they still extract as .dat files. How do you convert them to txt files? Any more help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Buddabudda]

Ok, switched my bios to load my slave drive first since a bootable windows sits there. It freezes during boot at the win 98 screen. No luck there.

I took out my system.dat and user.dat files from my d: (old drive) and put them in my c: (new drive). Regedit didn't change so I think you have to boot from the sys and user dat files for regedit to see them. Thought I put the originals back ok but it borked my system. Backup recovery takes a LONG time. But my machine is back to normal now.

I think it's time to give up, so long half-life.