The Windows 95 Setup program has a wide variety of switches that you can use to control the execution of this setup program. You can list the various switches by booting to DOS mode and then running the Windows 95 Setup program with the /? switch. However, not all switches are listed.
One unlisted switch is the /p switch which lets you pass instructions directly to the detection manager.
In order to skip the Registry during hardware auto-detection, you need to specify the /p switch with the "f" option. This is called the Clean Registry mode, and it causes the root branch of the Registry to be cleaned before the detection starts. Note that this switch only works when you run SETUP from the DOS prompt, it does not work if the graphical user interface portion of Windows 95 has already been started. Give the following command at the DOS prompt
SETUP /p f