where to find the file with the Environmental Variables

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Guest

Hi, I've had a harddisk-crash (disk with WinXP OS on). The disk is not
fixable, but I can partially read it through a live-CD (Linux). And to speed
up the setup/installation of my new disk, I want to get my environmental
variables from the old disk. Anyone know if that is possible?
 
Espen Klem said:
Hi, I've had a harddisk-crash (disk with WinXP OS on). The disk is not
fixable, but I can partially read it through a live-CD (Linux). And to speed
up the setup/installation of my new disk, I want to get my environmental
variables from the old disk. Anyone know if that is possible?
Click to expand...

Environmental variables are either stored in the registry
or are set by you. What variables were you thinking of
and why do you want to retrieve them?
 
The variables are the one found under:
System Properties > Advanced > Environmental Variables

I have a lot of software installed to get a build-environment going
(java-stuff) that needs these environmental variables (both PATH-stuff and
others). It's easy to get them out if I had WinXP running, but since the disk
has crashed and I only got read-access through a Linux Live CD, I wanted to
know if there were any way of copy a file and do some cut'n'paste.
 
Espen Klem said:
The variables are the one found under:
System Properties > Advanced > Environmental Variables

I have a lot of software installed to get a build-environment going
(java-stuff) that needs these environmental variables (both PATH-stuff and
others). It's easy to get them out if I had WinXP running, but since the disk
has crashed and I only got read-access through a Linux Live CD, I wanted to
know if there were any way of copy a file and do some cut'n'paste.
Click to expand...

You can find them here:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment
or here:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment

I haven't actually tested this but I expect that you can
read user variables by running regedit and loading the
file ntuser.dat from your profile folder as a hive. The
same would apply to system variables: In this case you
need to load the System registry file. Linux can do this
with ease, as can WinXP on another machine if it can
read the disk.

If these variables are so important and so difficult to recreate
then you should protect yourself against future mishaps by
backing them up. This simple command will do it for you:

set > c:\EnvVariables.txt
 
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