9x registry restore?????

[Denis P]

I've had a couple of people tell me, within the last month or so, that it was possible to restore the registry to a certain point, as in XP or Go Back fashion.
I've never heard of it with Win9x. My question is "Are these people confused, or have I missed it?

[WebHead]

There is not a "System Restore" app in Win9x. But you can back up the registry whenever you want and then manually restore it whenever you want (from typing regedit at the command line.)

[Denis P]

That's the way I always understood it. Just wanted to make sure I was on the right track.
Thanks

[Platypus]

With the facilities supplied with Win, you can either use Regedit as WebHead said, export the registry at various rollback points, then import in DOS if a recovery is necessary. Or you can automate the process by installing the Emergency Recovery Utility, ERU.EXE from the Windows CD. It will enable you to backup named configurations to restore later, if necessary booting from a floppy disk. A problem is that most systems have registry & companion system config files of a size too large to fit on a floppy disk, so for emergency recovery where Windows is too mangled to boot from the hard drive, an LS120, or bootable ZIP or CD are best.

[Jeff the Brit]

Win95 only keeps one backup of the current registry, c:\windows\user.da0 and system.da0 .
Win98 keeps a backup from the first boot of the day for the last five days, stored in c:\windows\sysbackup as .cab files, usually rb001.cab and so on. System.ini, win.ini, system.dat and user.dat are in the cab files. If you want to restore one from DOS, one way of doing it is boot to command prompt (not safe mode), type scanreg, the current registry gets checked then there is an option to view backups and restore any one of them. In my experience, it's better than that damn Win ME system restore which doesn't seem to work when you most need it. There is a registry hack to increase the number of backups that are kept, but I can't be bothered to look it up right now (4am here). I miss the system file checker in Win98/SE that got dropped from ME too, that was one of Bill's better ideas in my opinion.

[Platypus]

[quote]Originally posted by Jeff the Brit:
<strong>
Win98 keeps a backup from the first boot of the day for the last five days, stored in c:\windows\sysbackup as .cab files</strong><hr></blockquote>

Hey thanks, I didn't realise that. It may sort out a nuisance "make one good one out of two crook ones" job I've had sitting around on the back burner for a while stuck in a registry restore loop at bootup.

[Gameguru]

Make sure you use the switch "/restore" as well. As in:

scanreg /restore

from a dos prompt. I find this is the quickest and most troublefree way to restore a registry.

[Denis P]

Thanks guys. That is what I've been hearing about.