Sunday, January 03, 2010

Explore registry of dead pc

My PC is dead.
Well, I have a new one now :-)
As it was a Windows machine, some valuable data was stored in the registry but since the pc refused to launch again (yes, even with Ubuntu 9.0 on-the-fly-disk..) I thought I've lost it.
Searching the Internet I found this simple yet useful Windows Registry File Viewer. Simply download the zip file and run the .exe file.
Now I took the hard disk from my late pc, connected it to my new pc, and browsed to the registry file:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\ntuser.dat

A really important feature of this registry viewer is that it's also a registry exporter. Select the registry node you'd like to export, click "file" and then "export to REGEDIT4 format" and you're good.
In order to import this registry file, just double click it and it's values are added to your current pc registry file.

Original FAQ page.