Drive mappings. A frequent problem where I work. When a users machine fails completely, IT is pretty quick to replace it. But the user says they are still incapable of doing their job because he or she has lost all the file-shares they had mapped as drives. And these drive mappings were not part of the users group policy. And no, they don’t remember what shares were mapped because IT backs everything up, don’t they?
Ok, so I am being a bit snarky here. But there is a way to recover drive mappings in Windows XP without too much effort. Requirements are that the hard disk from the failed computer must be still readable, and another functional machine that you can put the drive in as a secondary disk.

First to recover the user’s registry file from the failed machine:

1. Mount the drive for the failed system on a bootable machine.
2. Under D:\Documents and Settings\username, where “username” is the user that had the drive mappings, backup the NTUSER.DAT file to another drive. Click Here for an Image Example.

Next, recover the needed Registry Keys:

3. Load Regedit on another XP machine or the rebuilt computer.
4. Select the HKEY_USERS branch. Click Here for an Image Example.
   Select File -> Load Hive… Click Here for an Image Example.
5. Browse to the backed up NTUSER.DAT file and open it.
6. Assign a name (i.e. foobar) for the loaded hive. Click Here for an Image Example.
7. Browse to HKEY_USER\foobar\Network in Regedit. (Click Here for an Image Example) Under \Network there is a key for every mapped drive letter the user had. The values in the key have the path location for the mapped drive.
8. Right click on HKEY_USER\foobar\Network and select Export to save the keys to a file. Click Here for an Image Example.

To import the drive mappings into the registry:

9. The file is in plain text. If you want to import the drive mappings you must do some editing to the file. Click Here for an Image Example.
10. Open the file in Notepad, and select Edit -> Replace… Click Here for an Image Example.
11. For the “Find what:” field, enter: HKEY_USER\foobar
12. For the “Replace with:” field, enter: HKEY_CURRENT_USER
13. Click “Replace All”. Click Here for an Image Example.
14. Save the file and Click “Yes” to save the changes

Now you can import these registry entries back:

15. Have the user log into his or her new machine.
16. Double click the modified registry file, or right click and select “Merge”. Click Here for an Image Example.
17. Click “Yes”. Click Here for an Image Example.
18. Reboot.

When the user logs back in, his or her drive mappings should be restored to the way they were before.