Dennis,

  As the designers of ADSM have mentioned, ADSM will look in its backups
for data stored in the adsm.sys directory with a sub-directory of your
machine's name.    If you have a dead machine and for some reason you
cannot rename it, you can get around the problem with a little of fiddling.

Go to a live machine and edit the dsm.opt to the node name of your original
machine and restore the adsm.sys directory.   Rename the subdirectory that
is named after the original machine to the name of your new machine.
Backup adsm.sys, paying attention to the filespace names of the original
machine and the machine you are doing the fiddling on.  You may have to
relabel the volume to the original machines volume and then back after the
restore/backup.

You should be able to go back to the new machine now and restore the
registry.

Unfortunately, I had to do a similar process during an exchange full-server
restore firedrill.  I walked in thinking I could restore registries between
identical machines with no problem.  If you think the above process is
confusing, attempt it with several auditors watching you when you're not
even certain it will work.

You can use a similar technique to get a past version of the registry.
Restore a previous adsm.sys directory and then back it up again.  Now ADSM
will use this version when you do a registry restore.

Although you have been warned multiple times by others and probably didn't
even need these warnings, I will add mine to the bunch.  Using a registry
from a different machine or even from the same machine from an earlier date
is a risky proposition with no guarantees.    Take appropriate measures to
backup your current registry before messing with it.

Good luck,
  Dan T.