Monday, September 11, 2000		Article

Restoring the registry

Registry in Windows is referred to the place in the hard disk where all critical information about the computers, such as hardware components attached to the computer, system options selected by the computer, how memory of the computer is set up, and what application programs are to be present when the operating system is started, is stored. This is the guiding system for the computers. All Windows operating systems, like Windows 95, 98 and NT, have their own registry and are set when the computer is installed. For the purpose of understanding, registry is analogous to the simpler .INI (initialisation) and configuration files used in earlier Windows based systems. Though INI files are still in force and are supported for compatibility with the 16-bit applications written for earlier systems, yet now days all systems are based on registry.

Generally, the registry of computer gets updated when you install or uninstall new programmes on computer. Too frequent installing and uninstalling of application programmes, including games, may corrupt the computer’s registry in the long run. If, while using Windows 95 the registry gets corrupt, then you can restore your registry by using the following commands. Using these commands the Windows will restore registry to the last good registry, when your computer was successfully run.

In order to restore the registry in Windows 95

1. Start or restart your computer. After your computer starts, Windows displays the following text:

2. While the text is on your screen, immediately press the F8 key. You have to be very prompt here, as a slight delay will start loading the Windows 95. Now on pressing the key a menu will appears.

3. Choose the Command Prompt Only option.

4. At the command prompt, change to your Windows directory. For example, if your Windows directory is C:\ Windows, you would type the following:

cd c:\ windows

5. Type the following commands, pressing ENTER after each one. (Note that System.da0 and User.da0 contain the number zero and not o.)

attrib-h-r-s system.dat

attrib-h-r-s system.da0

attrib-h-r-s user.dat

attrib-h-r-s user.da0

6. If you want to contact product support, type the following to create files you can refer to:

copy system.dat system.bak

copy user.dat user.bak

7. Then type:

copy system.da0 system.dat

copy user.da0 user.dat

8. Restart your computer.

This would restore your registry to the previous good level.