-----Original Message-----
In said:
Hi all~
I had a hard drive meltdown earlier this week, and was
able to salvage almost everything file-wise to a new HD
and new Win2K install. My problem is that I want to
restore my Outlook Express folders and settings to the new
HD.
The old drive is unreadable to Windows and to the Recovery
Console (does not prompt for Admin pass and drops to CMD
prompt). I have, however, recovered the entire old WINNT
folder intact and saved it to the new HD. In order to
restore the OE stuff, I'm supposed to grab 4 keys from the
old registry and import them to the new registry. How can
I go about doing this? Can I just rename (while in
Windows) the current registry to a temp name, bring in the
old registry and fire up REGEDIT to dump the keys I need,
or am I way off base here... help greatly appreciated!
1) backup completely the current (live) registry using ntbackup.exe,
ERD, [x] "Also backup...."
2) Ensure you have backup copies of the static recovered registry
hive files before "loading" (below).
Then (W2K) start regedt32.exe and use "Registry (menu), Load
hive..." to load the appropriate hive file (likely SOFTWARE or
ntuser.dat (Current User)) *1
Review regedt32 Help, "load hive" and "loading hives" beforehand.
Once the hive is loaded in regedt32 start regedit and you can access
the loaded hive as usual (in regedit) exporting the keys you need to
a REG file.
Close regedit. Unload the loaded hive from regedt32. Close
regedt32.
Make a backup copy of the exported .REG file. Now you need to edit
the exported .REG file doing Search & Replace to alter the registry
path component that reflects the temporary name you used in regedt32.
IOW change the incorrect strings to be whatever is needed such as
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" for example. Also remove any data that is not
specifically required as you do not want to overwrite *everything*,
just what you need. For "Current User" data you will need to load
into HKEY_USERS and later import to HKEY_USER\<SID> on the current
system.
When finished Import (merge) the REG file.
The larger question may be "what do I need from the recovered
registry?" It seems you already have a source authority for that.
*1 ntuser.dat would have existed in your old Profile (not in the
Windows tree).
===========================
That I hope answers your question and correctly. But I have to
wonder why not just go to an OL/OE group for details and Import data
from the recovered data files... What registry settings for OE could
be worth doing all of the above?
Excellent response Mark, much appreciated.
The backup procedure is located here:
http://www.oehelp.com/backup.aspx
I certainly would rather do it an easier way if I could,
and again I'll say that while the drive is unreadable from
Windows Explorer or Recovery Console, I do have access to
the entire file system (100% AFAICT) using Stellar Phoenix
NTFS Recovery software. I don't know if just fixing the
boot sector might even bring the entire hard drive
bootable again, as this was definitely not a hardware
failure. I'm just afraid of messing with the boot or MBR
areas and ending up NOT having access to the filesystem
any longer, before I have the chance to get everything
backed up. Now that I have a fresh version of Win2K
running and all my data backed up, I just need to get this
OE data brought over. It's very important data (or I
wouldn't be bothered with it), as I run a webserver and
have about 12 email accounts within OE. This is definitely
worth my time to get it all restored.
If you have any other suggestions, I'm all ears (or
rather, eyes
)
** For purposes of completeness, and what might prompt a
response as to how to make the old HD bootable again, here
is what originally happened:
I was downloading a large number of files (in excess of
1,000) overnight. I left the machine downloading
and 'locked' it (CTRL-ALT-DEL "Lock Computer"). When I
arrived in the morning, all looked well, so I typed in my
password and hit Enter. A small dialogue box popped up
saying "Your password expires today... would you like to
change it now?" I thought this strange, for as long as
I've run Win2K now (>4 years), I've never seen this prompt
for an Administrator login. I selected 'No' figuring once
inside Windows, I'd check the Users admin area and look
around. As soon as I mouse clicked on 'No', the machine
clicked, screen went black, and it began re-booting. It
went through the BIOS POST quickly, said 'Searching for
boot sector on IDE-0' (or similar), then said "Error
loading Operating System". Thus began my horror story for
this week.
In the BIOS (ECS Elitegroup K7S5A v3.1), the drive config
area refuses to recognize the drive's actual parameters
any longer. Highlighting it and pressing Enter to auto-
detect it results in it saying "AUTO - 163GB" but no
cylinders or anything are detected as is usual (although
the drive size is correct). If I save and exit the BIOS,
then come back in, the 163GB is gone and it just
says "AUTO" unless I highlight and press Enter again. In
Windows, with the drive connected as a Slave, if I click
on the drive letter in Windows Explorer, windows reports
that this drive is not formatted, would I like to format
it now...? Phoenix reconstructed the entire filesystem,
but probably 90% of what was recovered was put into 'lost'
folders (including the WINNT folder contents). While the
folder names were apparently 'lost', the files themselves
are 100% intact... everything was there and salvagable to
my amazement. It's all backed up, new system up and
running, all I gotta do now is get that OE stuff ported
over and I'm back to being productive again.
Thanks again~
IAB
