Quick Fix: Get Computer Name from a Slave Drive…

Arrgh!

So a client called with a PC that crashed and wouldn’t boot up.

Luckily i was actually in the area so i called in to the customer, unluckily i was travelling light and didnt have my USB/SATA kit with me.

PC was a reasonably new Dell Optiplex 380, Running Windows 7 Pro. Covered under warranty and after a few minutes on the Dell Online Chat, i had arranged an engineer to be onsite next day with a new drive.

I decided to take the drive with me to see if i could salvage anything, and possibly image the drive for future recovery use.

So i brought the disk back to the office and set it up on a bench, ran a chkdsk and after that it seemed to function ok. (i could have done this onsite with an OS disc,  but if it failed once i would rather have a new drive thank you)

So Dell have now replaced the drive and installed the OS, buuut wait, they dont join it to the domain or install any apps.

I need to know the name of this pc to rejoin it to the domain, i could make up a new name, but we have a convention… seems as though the system name sticker is missing as well.

So here’s what you can do.

Load up Regedt32 on the lab system, with the drive attached as a slave.

Navigate to HKLM and click file, load hive.

Now browse to the \windows\system32\config folder on the slave drive and find the SYSTEM file.

Enter a name – i used OLD

Now browse to HKLM>Old>CurrentControlSet1>Control>Computername>Computername

You should see a key named ‘ComputerName’ with the system name as the value.

Easy!