Merge registry settings on a different machine?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ralph A. Schmid, dk5ras
  • Start date Start date
R

Ralph A. Schmid, dk5ras

Hi!

Is there a possibility that I take my XPE systems, plug the CF card
with it into an USB cardreader and edit/merge the registry on this CF
on my desktop PC? Maybe with some special software, similar to
regedit, but allowing to oopen the registry of another system?

Thank you for any idea!

Ralph.
 
Ralph,

Yes, it is possible. Nothing special though. Just use Regedit.exe from XP Pro.
Select Local Machine Hive node in regedit and go to and select File-->Load Hive menu where you can browse to the runtime image hives
on your CF card.
 
KM said:
Ralph,

Yes, it is possible. Nothing special though. Just use Regedit.exe from XP Pro.
Select Local Machine Hive node in regedit and go to and select File-->Load Hive menu where you can browse to the runtime image hives
on your CF card.
Click to expand...

Hmmm, I see. But what does happen then? I have to enter a name of a
key, but what then? I do not want to mess my local registry, just want
to open a "remote" registry, merge some .reg-files into it and save it
again. Is somewhere a kind of how-to available, how this can be done?

Ralph.
 
Ralph,

Your "local registry" is nothing more than a database stored in a few registry hives (system, software, etc.).
The target device registry structure is the same.

RegEdit tool allows you to load and operate on any registry hive (version 5 and higher).

So what you do is - you load your target PC hive in RegEdit (you have to assign it a subkey name under HKLM to be able to work with
it in regedit), make necessary modifications in that hive, unload hive (File menu) or simply close regedit and reboot.

These operations on a remote hive (target PC hive) have no affect on your local registry at all.

Merging .reg files into a custom loaded hive (the remote hive loaded in regedit) is a little bit tricky. You have to make sure you
work with the proper registry paths in the .reg file (e.g., if you load System hive the registry paths must start with HKLM\System)
and you will have to add the name of the subkey you typed in when you loaded that hive in regkey to all the reg.paths in that .reg
file.
For instance, you loaded System hive in regedit and assigned it name Test.
If your reg file contains the following key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\MountedDevices]
it will have to be converted to:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Test\System\MountedDevices]

Hope this helps.
 
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