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anand · Mon Sep 05, 2005 10:19 pm

Anyone know of a free registry program that can open registry .DAT files directly (for example to view the registry information for a Windows installation on a different drive) to view them and export data out of them? The standard regedit.exe does not have this capability.

I'm trying to pull out some information out of an NTUSER.DAT file from an old hard drive... Namely a bunch of PuTTY session configurations. I can input them one by one again but if I can just import the PuTTY registry information directly it'd save me some time

Mon Sep 05, 2005 10:49 pm

In regedit.exe, go File -> Export. You may want to highlight the key that you want to export first before triggering the menu item. It will export the key and its subkeys into a text (.reg) file.

anand · Mon Sep 05, 2005 10:57 pm

Regedit can only view and export from the registry of the active Windows installation. It can't open "offline" registry files from another installation.

There is an "Import" option but that can only import the entire .DAT file and overwrite everything that is there already which doesn't sound like a great idea, at least for this purpose.

Usacomp2k3 · Tue Sep 06, 2005 8:46 am

Maybe this might help: Regedit for Unix

zgirl · Tue Sep 06, 2005 8:59 am

anand wrote:
Regedit can only view and export from the registry of the active Windows installation. It can't open "offline" registry files from another installation.

There is an "Import" option but that can only import the entire .DAT file and overwrite everything that is there already which doesn't sound like a great idea, at least for this purpose.

You wanna try that again? Using the load hive and unload hive you can open other hives from 'offline' installations. It is located in the file menu. I have done this to find the difference between settings on different machines.*

Now, I don't remember if this works under all flavors of windows. But it will work under NT, 2k, 2k3, XP.

*Load Hive and Unload Hive affect only the HKEY_USERS and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE keys and are active only when these predefined keys are selected. When you load a hive into the registry, the hive becomes a subkey of one of these keys.

anand · Tue Sep 06, 2005 9:30 am

Ah cool, that works. Thanks z-man. I got confused because those two menu items were greyed out on me (since I didn't select HKLM or HKU).

zgirl · Tue Sep 06, 2005 10:23 am

anand wrote:
Ah cool, that works. Thanks z-man. I got confused because those two menu items were greyed out on me (since I didn't select HKLM or HKU).

No Problem, just doing my part to keep people better informed.

I think, not 100% sure, that the other keys cannot load a hives because they are low level system hives that only MS is making changes to or the occasion app install.

That, and the Current User key is the registry settings for the current user logged in, which will change for each user as the log in.

Just my guess though. But again it can be done.

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