about registry editing

[mattoo]

sir\madam,
i made some changes in registry settings of windows xp and saved it as a .reg file somewhere in harddisk.but when i reinstalled xp, and double clicked .reg file; to my surprise not all the contents were exported however a dialog box appeared showing that all the contents were exported?????
kindly suggest me some trick so that i shall not have to manually tweak my reg. settings again & again.

[hansraj]

matoo
........... rule of the forum... all are friends here ... no sir no madam... ok

[ilugd]

You are trying to merge while logged in an admin account I hope?

[dharmeshhtailor]

registery is very complicated thing...
so it is more safe if u apply it manually all time..
bcoz some times there are prob in backing up and restoring registery...

[Pathik]

btw ur reg file shd merge witout ny probs...btw let our windows VI
sTAcome..... he s the registry expert....

[rakeshishere]

Where is VG.He shud probablyy get a brdband soon

[aditya.shevade]

What do you mean by " all contents were not insearted"? Which type of contents are they? (Types of keys?)

Where is VG by the way?

@matto: well, just importing the registry after reinstalling the OS and hoping to get all the programs and settings (preferences) back will not work. There will always be some settings that need to be configured manually.

This is because lets say you tweaked something in HKEY_CURENT_USER now you reinstall the OS and try to merge the tweaks and hope to get it correct, but the problem lies how windows sees the users. It creates a SID (secure IDentifier) which uniquely identifies the users. one in a millionth time will you find the same SID after reinstallation...and yes you will never find a same SID if you simply create and delete accounts even if all the details are exactly same.
since the SID is different so the tweak may not work.
A better option will be to take back-up of system-state

As far as the saving the registry tweaks goes, just right click on the desired key and select export.

[Vishal Gupta]

Here I'm

@mattoo

It'll be easy to us if u post the contents of the .REG file.

And also tell me how u took a backup of the Registry file before installing fresh windows!

[__Virus__]

Originally Posted by dharmeshhtailor

registery is very complicated thing...
so it is more safe if u apply it manually all time..
bcoz some times there are prob in backing up and restoring registery...

lol manual editing is not risky???

[ranjikvp]

Originally Posted by mattoo

i made some changes in registry settings of windows xp and saved it as a .reg file somewhere in harddisk.but when i reinstalled xp, and double clicked .reg file; to my surprise not all the contents were exported however a dialog box appeared showing that all the contents were exported?????
kindly suggest me some trick so that i shall not have to manually tweak my reg. settings again & again.

after a fresh reinstalation of the operating system you need to import the old .reg file that you had saved on the hdd and only then it will get effected, correct me if I am wrong guys, i guess just double clicking will not updated entire registry

@ranjikvp: buddy, importing and double-clicking are one and the same thing

[mattoo]

thank you i kill. your help came handy. please tell me more on system-state
__________
thanks for help...please tell me more about system state

my pleasure buddy

basically system state is used to take back-up of the current state of windows, including userprofiles etc. Here's more info

[mattoo]

thanx please tell me abt norton ghost & how to use it

yeah! I've heard of Norton Ghost but never gave it a try.
Just get a copy from somewhere, I hope it would be pretty easy to use as other symantec products are.
Anyways, norton ghost makes an image of your OS which can be used in case you need to "reinstall". Since all that it required is copying the files back to the HDD, it usually gets done in 5-10 Mins.
If you think a bit then you'll find out that OS "must" work if you copy the files to a safe location and back again. But then, it never works that way. some permission issues come into play(even with FAT32)
Norton Ghost does a low-level copy thus eliminating the permission issues.