Registry Edit with 2 NT OS

[WilsonIL]

This may sound silly, but my computer was infected with a virus earlier this month. I bought a new harddrive and had it installed with a new copy of XP Home Edition. In the meantime, I attached my original harddrive on as a slave. I was able to reinstall Windows XP with Repair option and everything worked great!

Unfortunately, through some efforts to retrieve my original monitor and graphics card settings on the XP Home Edition that was restored on my original harddrive, I inadvertently disabled VGASAVE. I was unable to restart my computer using this OS. I then decided to put the XP Home Edition software back in and do another restore in hopes of retrieving the original settings of VGASAVE. This did not work.

So in a long round about way, is there anyway I can boot up on the new XP Home Edition and edit my old XP Home Edition registry in hopes of resetting this back?

Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated!!!

Thanks,

Wendy

[oioldman]

Wendy,

If you can access your original hdd you should be able through windows explorer see,

<Original drive letter>\WINDOWS\system32\config\

and you should see the files;

default

system

software

you may also ntuser.dat and usrclass.dat (these are USER specific)

These files may be possibly be opened in wordpad or notepad and viewed.

Looking on http://www.micrsoft.com/technet and searching for registry files xp brings up quite a few useful guides that mauy assist

NeilW

[WilsonIL]

I wish I could get my original hdd to boot up completely. However, since I inadvertently disabled vgasave, all I get is a black screen. I can't see what is going on. I was hoping there would be someway I could edit the registry entries using the XP Home CD in the recovery mode. This would take me out to the c:, but I am not sure what to look for or do from this point.

Any more ideas?

Thanks,

Wendy

[WilsonIL]

Sorry, I read too quickly. I can get to the original hdd, I was just not sure what files to look for to change the registry entry for the vgasave. Does anyone have any idea where to look for this and then what to change it to?

Thanks,

Wendy

[scp]

First, DONT open the files with notepad or wordpad.

You can open them with regedit:

- Open regedit

- Select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

- Click on File -> Load Hive...

- Select the file SYSTEM (in <Original drive letter>\WINDOWS\system32\config\)

- Enter a name, e.g. SYSTEM_XP (because SYSTEM already exists in the tree)

- Select "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM_XP\ControlSet001\Services\VgaSave"

- Now you can change the values (I think setting "Start" to 1 would work)

- Select "SYSTEM_XP"

- Click on File -> Unload Hive

- Close regedit