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Recently, I had store cleaning at my work and I found a quite old 40gb IBM HDD. I was wondering what hardware was installed with it, i.e what CPU, mobo, PCI/ISA cards.
It has Windows XP installed on it. The details of file %system32%\ntkrnlpa.exe confirm it.
I have tried to get into registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DESCRIPTION to get any information, but have not found such items in %system32%\config (by loading hive into windows 7 64 regedit.exe with admin permissions).
I found VEN_xxxx&DEV_xxxx data in ControlSet001 registry, but still CPU, mobo is nowhere to be found.
Is there a way to get such information, i.e what CPU, BIOS, mobo?
Quote from wikipedia: "A fifth subkey, "HARDWARE", is volatile and is created dynamically, and as such is not stored in a file"
Qeeet
Posted 2019-09-29T22:53:16.243
Reputation: 367
I was able to find VEN_xxxx&DEV_xxxx information in the registry. But it is not exactly what I was looking for – Qeeet – 2019-09-29T22:59:56.203
Do you mean the hardware the drive and OS were originally connected to? – music2myear – 2019-09-30T05:33:54.060
@music2myear Yes – Qeeet – 2019-09-30T06:39:08.223
If the goal is to boot the drive, I would find an older machine from that timeframe and connect it and see if it will boot. If the goal is to copy data from the old drive that shouldn't require any system info. Not Sure what the value of obtaining the prior system's information? – Digi-gal – 2019-09-30T05:32:17.040
I think you could find the info in the registry, but I would probably just clone to an image file and try to boot in a virtual machine – deed02392 – 2019-09-30T14:54:40.457
Then please edit your question to make that more clear. – music2myear – 2019-09-30T23:46:48.150