Registry Edits

PureAppleJuice · 26 Jul 2007 at 14:20

Hi, backed up my old registry but how do I take out a couple of the registries without adding the whole lot? Just i've got all my games boxed away atm and thus cba to dig out the boxes to find CD keys, which afaik are put in the registry. Is there a program that will let me open old registry back ups?

Cheers,

.walls · 26 Jul 2007 at 14:36

registry file viewer is one such program which will allow you to do that - assuming you have saved the registry files themselves... but realistically, it (and it doesn't matter which program you use) will be a whole lot more hassle than just looking for the boxes...

If you've exported the registry (the file will have a .reg extension), then notepad.

MarcLister · 26 Jul 2007 at 16:43

As has been said, open registry files with Notepad.

And do you want to export certain parts of the registry? Just right-click on the key(s) you want to export and click the Export option.

Nefarious · 26 Jul 2007 at 18:08

The keys are highly unlikely to be in plain text, they will be masked or similar and you'd need to extract them and decrypt them. Finding the boxes is far more realistic.

.walls · 27 Jul 2007 at 08:41

MarcLister said:
As has been said, open registry files with Notepad.

And do you want to export certain parts of the registry? Just right-click on the key(s) you want to export and click the Export option.

<nit-pick>
Registry files are binary. (default, SAM, security, system, software, userdiff and ntuser.dat)
Exported registry keys are plain text (encoded in ANSI by default)

To back up the registry files - you need to either perform a system state backup or be running a secondary operating system: dual boot, or livecd for example - otherwise they are locked (security reasons). Then, to read them, you would need an application which is capable of loading the binary and showing it in a viewable format.
</nit-pick>