where to find registry file?

[qei]

I have a machine that will not boot to the hard drive. I have set up the customer's hdd as secondary master and a my test hdd as the master so that I can bring the machine up and look at their hdd. I am guessing that it needs a fresh Win '95 install and possibly a reformat. I need to find the cust Win registration information as I cannot get ahold of them right now. Is there some way to find this info when the drive is D:--regedit simply goes directly to the C: drive.

[jettlag]

Will not boot? Or will not boot into Windows?

Need more details on that part.

The serial number is locaed in the system.dat file located in the windows directory.

You'll have to use the attrib command to see the system.dat file and then if you edit that file you search for "PRODUCTID" and it will find the serial number.

Type this:
cd\windows
attrib -r -s -h system.dat
edit system.dat
(search for productid)

tada!

[qei]

Thanks so much for your help. I did find the info I needed. The system tries to come up but never gets into Windows--some times it tries to go into "Safe Mode" but locks up; other times it runs a scandisk then locks up on the Win '95 screen. The hdd seems ok as it is working fine as a secondary drive. I will let you know if the reinstall of Win95 helps. Thanks again for your input, let me know if you have any other suggestions.

[jettlag]

Locks in safe mode ya say?

Thats not good.

Things to try:

1) Set BIOS defaults - maybe something has been played with.

2) Try another Video card and/or RAM Chip

3) Remove all cards except video

4) Run scanreg /fix (backup 1st)

Good LucK!

[Apathy]

He has win95, no Scanreg. You can use the orignal copies of the registry but installed programs won't have thier entries, unless there are recent backups that are good. They are in the windows directory. They file extentions of .1st and .da0, ect.