Follow these steps:

1) Connect to the system (RAS)

2) Map to system with Administrative rights

3a) Rcmd to the system (install RCMD remotely if you have to)

3b) If rcmd is not possible; Use At.exe or Soon.exe and the remote scheduler service to run the next command

4) Run (start rdisk /s-) on the remote system--remove the brackets

5) Go to command prompt on your system and navigate to the mapped drive of the remote system drive.

6) Navigate to the \winnt\repair folder and copy the contents to your local drive

Once copying is done you can now disconnect from the remote system and view the registry locally after completing the next steps.

7) Find the repair folder contents on your local drive and decompress the hive you want to view (system or software usually)

Tip: use (\winnt\Extract.exe filenamesource filenamedestination) to extract the registry hive.

8) Open regedt32.exe and select the proper root key--usually Hkey Local Machine for the software or system keys

9) Choose load hive from the registry menu and select the hive you extracted from step 7 name the hive by a name you will recognize.

10) You may now navigate the remote registry as if it were a sub-branch of your own registry--you may even open regedit.exe and do registry searches through its GUI interface.

User registry keys

The User Registry keys can backed up and copied over RAS with special utilities from the Resource kit but the easiest way to get them is to get the remote system operator to log the user out from NT and when you connect you should be able to copy the ntuser.dat file from the root of their winnt\profiles\username folder so long as no logged in user is using the key.

Hardware registries

These are very elusive--they get re-written each and every boot. You can get a copy of this by having the remote operator load and export this key with their regedit.exe. You may then copy this file to your own machine for perusal (it can be imported into your own registry after you rename the root location in the .reg file).

Another way to do this is to use the resource kit "reg.exe" utility. The following is an example of how to use this:

Type the following exactly (cut and paste the example and change it as needed)--only substitute the remote machine name where you see "pmxxx" :

REG SAVE HKLM\Hardware\ s:\hardware \\PMXXX