Printing Restore Point Information From Another Computer

Since Harlan Carvey gave me an intro I felt I had to give up something else in order to make you want to come back.

Looking at the restore points you may wonder what all those files actually are and what they relate to in each RPXXX directory. Now if you are like me you will start to poke around and see if you can figure it out. At some point you may see that in the change.log.x there is a reference from the file found in the restore to another file located else where. Now what all the other information in the file means who knows since MS does not divluge that information.

Now MS has a nice little tool in the %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\restore directory called srdiag.exe. What this program does is to parse the restore point directory and give you all kinds of information about your restore points. Now you are probably asking how this will help me since when I run srdiag it will only produce the reports (it creates a cab file with all the info stored in it) for the restore point on my analysis computer.

Here are the steps to get restore point information from an xp image that you are analyzing (do the following steps putting your information in replace of mine):

1. Make sure Restore Points have been turned on for your analysis machine.

2. Make sure you have access to your "System Restore Directory" - Use the following command to get the access cacls ":\System Volume Information" /E /G :F

3. On the xp image you are analyzing copy the restore point directory in the "System Volume Information" directory to the "System Volume Information" on your analysis machine. At this point you should see 2 directories like _restore. One will be your analysis machine guid and the other will be from the image.

4. You will now need to edit your registry. Go to the following entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\SystemRestore\Cfg and rename the following field from MachineGuid to MachineGuid_old. Next create a new String Value of MachineGuid, edit this field and put the GUID that you copied from your image, use the MachineGuid_old as a template if you need to, the format of the 2 entries should be similar.

5. Now run the srdiag.exe from the %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\restore directory. Once the program has completed you should see a cab file with your machine name on it. In the cab file there will be all kinds of good information for you to look at.

6. Finally delete or rename the MachineGuid registry entry and rename the MachineGuid_old back to MachineGuid and remove the directory from your "System Volume Information" directory.

That is it in a nut shell. Enjoy looking at all the infromation provided to you by srdiag.