Dual Instances Of Registry Editors

[seekermeister]

I'm thinking of restoring some registry keys for a particular program that I deleted, by connecting a HD from another computer that has the same program installed. Since Regedit automatically looks at it's own registry, I would need another registry tool to look at the registry on the other HD, and be able to display both simultaneously to facilitate duplication. Can this be done?

 

[Ztruker]

Looks doable. Read here: Read registry of dead computer

 

[seekermeister]

Thanks, but there is too much puterese, and my head starts swimming after reading too much. What sounded fairly clear didn't work for me.

 

[Ztruker]

It "seems" pretty straight forward.

1. Open Registry Editor.
2. In the registry tree (on the left), click either the HKEY_USERS or
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE keys.
3. On the File menu, click Load Hive.
4. In Look in, click the drive, folder, or network computer and folder that
contains the hive you want to load. The hive is the files such as System,
Software, default and etc in the folder Windows\System32\Config folder.
5. Click Open.
6. In Key Name, type the name that you want to assign to the hive (OldSystem, OldSoftware, etc.) and then
click OK.

 

[seekermeister]

Where I went astray is that when one of the other 3 keys were selected, Load Hive was grayed out, and I didn't try either of those two. I'll try again after a bit.

EDIT: So are all of the keys created by all software programs located only in those 2 keys?

 

[Ztruker]

From angelfire.com:

HKEY_USERS: This subtree contains all actively loaded user profiles, including the default profile and a duplicate of information in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Profiles from remotely logged-on users are stored in the Registries of their local computers

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE: This subtree contains computer hardware information. Part of this subtree is reconstructed each time the computer is started to reflect the current hardware configuration.

From looking at the registry, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software is the primary location for installed programs though there may be entries scattered around in other places. How are you going to locate the registry entries you need? Do you have something specific you can search for?

 

[seekermeister]

For someone this probably would work, but I don't think that I'm that person. I did use the Load Hive and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software. and it seemed to add something to the wizard, but unfortunately, I didn't take note of what was already there. I think that it added BCD0000000, but looking in it, there are only two subkeys containing other keys that don't make any sense to me.

It seems that the further that I go, the more confused I am. I'm now considering reverting back to plan A, and simply obtain the data from my other computer, which currently is running on XP MCE. This means that the differences in registries is too great to simply copy one from the other, but I want to see what happens if I simply copy the key that contains the registration data all by itself.

If that doesn't work, then I will have to wait until my Seagate RMA arrives, so that I can reinstall W7 on it, and then install GetFLV, so that things are apples to apples.

 

[seekermeister]

Got it! All I had to do was to copy the keys within a key of HKEY_USERS, which contained the registration and some other data, and it's back in business.