How do I get to the registry of a mounted hard drive?

[MsBobina]

I have a Dell Inspiron that is in the imfamous BSOD loop and need to get into the registry. Can someone please tell me how to do that?

Thanks,

Tina

 

[samuria]

You can just load it in regedit you can load remotely as well

 

[SIW2]

Boot into Winpe ( You can use the installation media) Go to command prompt and type
regedit

Open regedit and click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE ( also known as HKLM) to highlight it.
Then File>Load Hive.

Browse to the hive you want to load.

Give it any name.e.g. if you loaded the system hive, you can name it SYS or MYSIS , or anything that makes sense to you.

You will then find that SYS is loaded under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE .

 

[MsBobina]

Samuria, but regedit will take me to the registry of the main system on my laptop wouldnt it?

Siw2, what is winpe and what installation media are you referring to? I don't have any of the discs for the OS.

Thank you.

 

[MsBobina]

I think I may have gotten it. I will let you guys know. Thanks.

 

[MsBobina]

Ok what I need to know is whats a hive? I'm at that point where I load a hive and I don't know what I'm looking for.


Please help, thanks.

 

[samuria]

Put simply a hive is a document containing other reg entered you can load it to see it doesn't become part of the reg

 

[SIW2]

Browse to windows\system32\config . In there you will find the hives.

They are called Components, Default, Software, System. There will other files in there as well called Security and Sam, as well as .log files and .regtrans files.

You are probably only interested in the System hive.

 

[MsBobina]

Thanks you two. Your instructions helped me perfectly.