dat file disassociate

My dat files on one machine have no association. For some reason, the dat files were corrupted on another machine and associated with a program and giving me errors. I tired to unassociate the dat files, but my only option is to select a program and I don't want them to be associated with any program. That's the way they're supposed to be. I rand a registry repair and that didn't seem to work.

 

You can change the association by opening a command line session and typing:

assoc.dat= and press enter and it should report the action taken. By leaving it blank following the = symbol, it will not be associated with anything, which is the normal default.

After doing the above, type assoc.dat and press enter. It should display File association not found for extension .dat

 

Did not work. I tried the run box and the cmd box.

 

You'll have to help me by providing more information. The more info you give, the quicker we can get to the solution.

Did the command get recognized and execute? By that I mean, did it render a message that indicated that it worked?

Typing assoc.dat into a command window and pressing enter should deliver a text message about the association for .dat files, as I posted earlier. Did it do that? If not, what did it say, if anything?

It should have said, "File association not found for extension .dat "

Did it?

 

It did exactly what you said it would do. Then the files did not change their association.

 

Normally it will not affect any program if the .dat files are incorrectly associated. You never run them directly anyway and the program that uses them will use them regardless of the association. They are used by many different programs. If the association was a problem, you would have widespread errors rather than just on one particular program.

You may have some program that needs to be repaired by uninstalling and reinstalling and the .dat file association is just a "red herring. "

Edit. Another point to be aware of, when you change the association for the file, as per the assoc.dat= command, you will need to log off and back on before the icon will change for the displayed file. The association will change instantly but the icon lags behind until you either log off or reboot.

 

I did reboot. The association did not change. all dat files are associated with the wrong program and one in particular issued an error which, if I remember correctly was more of an annoyance that an issue. I guess I'll just uninstall the program it's associated with but the program is a reminder program for which I will have to retype all the dates and alarms.

 

Have you tried Folder Options > File Types > Click .dat > Delete?

Or remove the default value for .dat in registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

 

Now that's my kind of fix.

 

It's simple when you know the answer, thank you for posting back.