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Utility to read registry files (not regedit)

Hi Guys,

Recently my desktop was upgraded to Win 7 pro 64 bit,

I have the windoze registry files from my previous w7 32 bit.

Some of the software I used would record configuration info in the registry under LOCAL MACHINE>SOFTWARE>{some program}/etc... An example is the ODBC entries.

Unfortunately id did not occur to me to "export" these configuration entries in order to be able to "import" into the new 64bit registry.

Therefore, my requirement is to somehow access these registry files in order to export the said configuration.

I have already downloaded and tried "RegeditX" and "Register Manager 7", but the "pro" version costs $$$.

My question: is there an open source registry editor out there?
Or is there another way to do it?

SOLUTION

Dan Craciun

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kaufmed

My question: is there an open source registry editor out there?

Open source... or free? The two are not one in the same ; )

McKnife

Details, please. Why is it a problem to import those you have? Of what format are those?

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☠ MASQ ☠

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MikeOM_DBA

ASKER

(regedit) . . .It is capable viewing the offline registry files from your previous install without affecting your current one.

How can I do this?

The registry I want to access is on another disk which has an inactive W7 32 bit OS.

Some of the utilities I use to connect to Unix servers apart from configurations data for each servers, record the ssh keys. I would like to avoid having to setup these connections all over again. The utilities are: "putty" and "WinSCP" which share this data.

Also I would like to recover all the ODBC connections that were setup.

Nirsoft seems promising...will test tomorrow.

Thanks.

☠ MASQ ☠

In Regedit you can just create a temporary location to load the Software hive into, then browse that as if it were an active machine, find all the registry values you want and either copy or export them, just remember to unload the hive when you're done.

An example for the HKLM\Software Hive you asked about here:
http://forum.sysinternals.com/reading-windows-registry-offline_topic25765.html

SOLUTION

McKnife

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MikeOM_DBA

ASKER

Great!
I will test in the morning...
Thanks.

MikeOM_DBA

ASKER

The "load the hive" worked for "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" which is what I needed.
For others it appeared non-selectable.
Thanks!

MikeOM_DBA

ASKER

Ooops, I closed it too fast!
I could recover all from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SOFTWARE...
BUT....
I have data to recover from HKEY_CURRENT_USER>SOFTWARE... and the "load hive: appears non-selectable.
Any work-around?
PS: Just tested nirsoft and did not work for HKEY_CURRENT_USER:

E:\OLD_Windows_folder\System32\config>D:\Downloads\RegFileExport.exe "E:\OLD_Win
dows_folder\System32\config\RegBack\SOFTWARE" "Old_reg.txt" "HKEY_CURRENT_USER"

Failed to open the specified Registry Key

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☠ MASQ ☠

The contents for HKCU\Software are located in \%userprofile%\ntuser.dat

So in Win 7 in X:\Users\<profile name for HKCU> (Where X is the drive letter containing the offline system)

Load hive in the same way

MikeOM_DBA

ASKER

Found it, but unfortunately it loads into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and cannot make it load into HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

I tried export/import with no luck!

MikeOM_DBA

ASKER

GOT IT!!!!
Exported and Imported as REGEDIT4 (old version) and it worked.
Thanks to all...