Restoring the xp registry?

Amaru

Right, i have a huge problem. I was tinkering with the registry after receiving some bad advice, and now windows can't start, because i deleted the registry values relating to lsass.exe, something thats vital to windows running. The good news is that i created a full backup right before i did this. How do i go about restoring the windows registry without actually being able to get into windows?

thelad

From what I can remember before during your last boot your good registry would have been saved under two files -sys.da0 and user.da0.
You now need to find these through dos and rename to sys.dat and user.dat
I think they are located in the system32/config folder.
The back up files are hidden so you will need to change the file attributes also..sorry I cant give more detail but it's just not fresh in my head (-;

Amaru

Can anybody confirm this? And how do i make it display hidden files in dos?

Gone West

if you exported your registry from regedit-file-export, you will have created a .reg file somewhere (default is my documents). You just need to load up regedit again and go to file-import and select the .reg file.

Amaru

No, like i said, windows has crashed, so i can't import from inside it using regedit. Unless it can be accessed from DOS?

thelad

ok maybe stupid q but have you tried F8 on powerup and then boot to last known good configuration?

thelad

this link might be useful:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545

thelad

or try this one:
http://labmice.techtarget.com/windowsxp/TroubleshootingXP/startup.htm

Good luck!

Amaru

thelad wrote:

this link might be useful:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545

i was actually looking at this exact link right before you posted it, and now it works fine. Cheers mate!

thelad

nice one! (-;