ITEE Home » Mike Van Emmerik » Win95 Registry recovery

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If you ever get a corruption of the Windows Registry settings when using Windows 95, then you may be able to use the following to recover. Note: as with Windows NT, this only works if you realise immediately and don't allow Windows to boot a second time before fixing the problem.

Reboot with the menu (use F8 if necessary), and choose option 6 (Prompt only). Change to the main windows directory, unprotect these files, and make these copies:

cd \windows     (or wherever)
attrib -r -s -h system.*
attrib -r -s -h user.*
copy system.da0 system.dat
copy user.da0 user.dat

Reboot. This should use the last good registry settings.

Registry settings

If you have the problem that the registry settings say to use a particular .VXD file, and the above has not worked, then you could try this.

Boot in safe mode, open a dos box (ignore the warning), and type "regedit". This should bring up a not well publicised program that allows you to edit the registry settings. In my case, I found the required setting under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VXD