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I have an old windows disk that got winrot under Win Pro XP/32. I installed a new disk and did a fresh install of Win 7/64. After that successfully completed, I reattached the old windows disk.

I'd like to retrieve certain registry settings from the older Win Pro XP/32 system for possible integration into my new Win 7/64 system for some of the reinstalled applications.

So the problem: I know that my user settings are contained in ntuser.dat and the other pieces of the registry are contained in files located in the old X:\windows\system32\Config*. How do I examine or dump the old registry given that I have all these files available?

Zoredache
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mdpc
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1 Answers1

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From within Windows it is pretty easy to do with the Registry editor. Just load the file as a hive.

  • Open up regedit.
  • Click onto the HKEY_USERS hive.
  • Click File and Load Hive.
  • You will be asked for a name, use something that is not used like 'TempReg'.
  • Once the hive is loaded you can browse into HKEY_USERS\TempReg (or whatever name you used).
  • When you are done, browse to the top of the hive you loaded and use the File, and Unload Hive to disconnect from that file.

use ntuser.dat for the HKEY_USER hive file then?

When you load a hive it appears as if it was within the existing hive, that is why you give it a name. The ntuser.dat is the file that stores HKEY_CURRENT_USER. You can only load a hive if you have HKEY_USERS or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE selected, but it doesn't really matter which one. I like to have HKEY_USERS selected because it is almost no confusion between the hive I loaded at the other per-sid keys that are in HKEY_USERS.file then?

Zoredache
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