Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Restoring a Backed-up Registry

Now that you know how to back up your Registry, the next logical step is to learn how to restore it. You need to be comfortable enough doing this that the prospect doesn’t scare you; no one looks forward to repairing a damaged Registry, but it shouldn’t be frightening either. Practice until you’re comfortable with the approaches described in the rest of the section.

The Old-Fashioned Way

Restoring the Registry from a manual backup isn’t useful in all circumstances, since to restore the hive files you must be able to boot your machine and gain access to Windows 2000’s boot partition, as described earlier in the chapter. Once you’ve booted your machine into DOS, Linux, or some other OS that gives you access to the partition where your hive files are stored, all you need to do is copy the backup copies over to the original hive directory. (Of course, you have to uncompress them first if they’re compressed!) Reboot into Windows 2000, and you’re done.

While this approach is appealingly simple, it has its disadvantages. Apart from requiring that you be able to boot into another OS, it has the drawback of being indiscriminate. When you restore a hive, you’ll be restoring everything in the hive. This can have the unwanted consequence of removing changes you wanted to keep while fixing whatever problem originally required you to use a backup.

Using Windows 2000 Backup

Restoring a Registry backup with Windows 2000’s backup utility is fairly painless. It’s not ...