Registry Checker

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A couple of days ago, some of the programs on an old HP Pavilion 4530 350-Socket 7 AMD began causing it to lock up. I discovered at first that the cpu fan was out. Replaced the cpu fan, put it back together, now the only screen I get is below….forever. It never will get past this. I can boot to C prompt with a startup disk, but was wondering if anyone knew what I might do to move past this screen.

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OK, maybe this will help someone else. What I did to cure it was to boot to safe mode command prompt only and not load anything but the himem sys file. Then from C: use scanreg/fix and it fixed the registry.

Details are here from the MSKB.

Evidently the cpu fan malfunction must have caused an incomplete boot because there were 5 started registry backups listed back to 11/15/02 when using C:scanreg/restore and there was not a valid registry backup (???). Me thinks the user must have attempted to reboot several times to cause this????

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Boy, I would have thought it would not have erased all the backups before saving another good one.

Just another reason to have an excessive number of backups! I have 15…

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Agreed. MS recommends 5. After this, I tend to think 15 would be more appropriate and shall make it so. Before fixing it, the restore effort listed all of the previous attempts as “Started…”

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Find a file named “scanreg.ini” in your C:/Windows folder. Double-click on it to open it. Look for these lines:

;This sets the Maximum number of Backup Copies stored
MaxBackupCopies=5

Change that to whatever number you like (I think max = 99).

IMPORTANT NOTES:

1) You cannot access more than FIVE backup files from the Registry Checker during the reboot process.
2) The Registry Checker on reboot may NOT give you the five most recent registry backup files.

These are minor points for me — I am aware of them and know how to get around the problems. But, anyone who changes this number should be aware of these facts.

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Hi R2:
How do you get around the “show only 5” backups problem? i.e. if you save 15 (I used to save 10), how do you access them, if necessary?
Thanks,

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Well, there’s the manual way and the automatic way! Let’s start with some background information.

If I remember correctly, Windows does NOT necessarily store “Registry Backup” cabs (rb00x.cab) in the order that makes the most sense. One would hope that rb000.cab would be ‘younger’ than rb001.cab, which in turn would be ‘younger’ than rb002.cab, etc. Boy, that is how I would design it — but if memory serves me correctly, that is not what happens consistently. The numerical order of the cab files cannot be assumed to be in ‘order-by-date’.

By design, the DOS Registry Checker in ‘/restore’ mode will only show you five different backup registries to choose from: usually rb000.cab – rb0004.cab inclusively. The obvious problem is that those might not be the five most recent backups.

Well, you can personally choose which five cab files the Registry Checker shows you. Simply go into the C:WindowsSysbckup folder and locate the rb00x.cab files. Create a new folder — call it ‘RB Storage’ — and move ALL of them into this new folder. Go into the new folder and arrange the files by Date Modified. Move the five cab files that you desire back into the parent Sysbackup directory. Now, rename these five files in order-by-date rb000.cab through rb0004.cab.

You can then run the DOS Registry Checker (/restore) and you will be given those five options.
________________________

OK, that is the general concept of the manual method. To use an automatic method to access more than five cab files, I will refer you to Bob Sturtevant’s script from PC911:
How To Back Up And Restore Your Registry In Windows 98

Hope that answers your question.

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It does. Thank you very much. Now if only I can remember to keep them up to date. I once had 5 corrupted registries that wouldn’t boot. I had to restore everything from a backup (fortunately I did have one).

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