Win98banter - View Single Post - How do you restore an older version of the registry in XP?

**Lostgallifreyan**

wrote in :

In both cases if you screw up Windows to the extent that it won't start,
you'll need a way out of trouble: there is a way from SR I'm not that
familiar with, and for ERUNT you'll need to get to a point where you can
(get at and) run the executable it puts with the save: ERUNT's author
recommended BartPE when I asked him (if your disc is FAT rather than
NTFS a DOS boot floppy will do).

You just answered one of my questions. I was wondering what a person
would do who cant boot to Windows to run this ERUNT. Booting from dos
is simple (I always have a floppy drive available too). Of course if
the HD is formatted to NTFS, I guess I'd be screwed. This is one
reason I do not want a drive with NTFS. Unfortunately I'm stuck with
one with NTFS at the moment, but that will be changed when I can
figure out how without losing the installation of XP.

ERUNT sort of convinced me, as it could mean same basic methods for all
Win32, but there is a tautology here... If we are on an NT kernel OS, we
either need FAT32 so we can boot to DOS from another drive and manage backup
files, or we need NTFS writing support. This may be untrue if the main OS can
still boot, but with a borked registry, all bets on that are off.

In other words, once you're down to a basic need to boot from another drive,
the problem is a basic disk access thing, no special need for ERUNT at all,
except to make the backups you might later have to reach via a rescue disk.

In W98, the registry editor can run in DOS with switch /C to create the
registry from a file. As it can export the entire registry to file, unlike NT
kernel OS's, there are two ways to easily handle entire regeneration of the
registry (the other being the DAT files). NT kernels may be touted as
'secure' but the cost of that security is an even greater weakness, one
particularly irritating to die-hard WXP evangelists because DOS is the only
easy or versatile way to get round it, and there is no way to do it without
rebooting. WXP's lack of DOS and its alleged need not to reboot is hardly a
strength, it'sm, based on the totally unwarranted assumption that its
registry won't ever **** up.