Tuesday, 23 August 2011

Fixing a Corrupt Registry


If your registry has become corrupted, and re-installing Windows over your existing installation does not fix the problem, there is a hidden, read-only, system file on the root of your boot drive called SYSTEM.1ST. This is the initial system registry created when you first installed Windows. To use this file:
1. In DOS, go to your Windows directory.
2. Strip the attributes of your current SYSTEM.DAT with the following syntax: ATTRIB -r -s -h SYSTEM.DAT
3. Copy C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.DAT to SYSTEM.BAD as a backup
4. Switch down to the root directory of the drive Windows is installed on. 5. Strip the attributes of SYSTEM.1ST with the following syntax: ATTRIB -r -s -h SYSTEM.1ST
6. Copy SYSTEM.1ST to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.DAT
This is a last minute fix for the Registry. It will not restore any information about your 32-bit apps thus you will need to reinstall them or any other programs that modified your system registry. 16-bit apps do not modify the registry so, those should be able to remain in place. To avoid this problem, you need to backup your registry on a regular basis!

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