Question

Where can I find the details of all my mapped drives? I have a substantial amount of mapped drives on my old Windows XP install and wish to export or retrieve them in some way so I can recreate the mappings on my new XP install. The old Windows XP is not running, but I do have the hard disk connected hoping that I can recover the mappings from the old hard drive prior to reformatting.

Answer

You can retrieve the Mapped drives listing by loading the user registry (NTUSER.DAT) from the old Windows XP installation. Assuming that the old drive is already connected, and the drive-letter is accessible from My Computer, follow these steps:

• Click Start, Run and type regedit.exe
• Select the HKEY_USERS branch.
• From the File menu, choose Load Hive...
• Browse your user profile folder in the old Windows XP drive, and select the file named NTUSER.DAT. Note that each user profile has its own NTUSER.DAT (which is the user registry. Be sure to choose the one for your user profile which contains the actual drive mappings.)
• Assign a name for the newly loaded hive (say, OldUserHive) when prompted.
• Then navigate to the following location:

HKEY_USERS\OldUserHive\Network

• Each subkey under the above branch represents a network drive. The actual location of the network drive is stored in a value named RemotePath. You may export the above branch using the Export option under the File menu.
• Select the branch OldUserHive
• From the File menu, choose Unload Hive...
• Exit the Registry Editor.