accidentally imported registry

[C-squared]

I had a brain fart and started to import a reg file into my current
registry. I quickly realized what I was doing and hit alt-ctrl-del to end
the task. But I think some of my settings are screwed. This was a pretty
new installation of Win 2000 and I do not have a backup.

Is there a way to undo this? If so, how? I wanted to view something in an
old reg file and just spaced out for a minute I guess. Any help would be
appreciated!

 

[Mark V]

I had a brain fart and started to import a reg file into my
current registry. I quickly realized what I was doing and hit

What area of the registry was affected? HKCU? HKLM?
HKLM\Software\?

alt-ctrl-del to end the task. But I think some of my settings
are screwed. This was a pretty new installation of Win 2000 and
I do not have a backup.

How new? You can revert the SOFTWARE (example) hive to the "as
installed" copy in %systemroot%\repair\ (if that is appropriate)
Method not specified here at this time. This will "lose" all
software settings (in HKLM\software\) since installation though and
may not be suitable. Cure could be worse in other words.

Is there a way to undo this? If so, how? I wanted to view
something in an old reg file and just spaced out for a minute I
guess. Any help would be appreciated!

For the future:
Change the .REG extension association to default to "open in
notepad.exe" to avoid accidents.
Get and use ERUNT (or any other method to make and save Full
Registry Backups (not "exports") regularly. Against any such
future accidents.

If the accident was just a few keys, valuenames, data it may be
easier to compare and manually repair them. I will guess "too
many" may have been overwritten by way of the import/merge action.
Impossible to say more without knowing the area of the registry and
the extent of the data contained in that REG file.

 

[NewScience]

The easiest would be to post the .reg file here so that someone can tell you
how to undo it.
If the changes were only to the Current User registry key, you can basically
just create a New User account, copy the files for the old to the new and
then delete the old account. You would have to check the contents of the
..reg file you merged, and see it the key was always HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

If the changes are widespread then you would have to:

Since the registry is broken into multiple parts you basically would have to
either do a repair (the easiest since you said this is a fairly new
installation and hope the changes you made are overwritten by the repair -
no quarantees), or just reinstall.

There are two places you can look prior to reinstall/new install:

C:\winnt\repair
Check the dates for the following files:

System
SAM
Software
Default
Security

and compare with current dates of C:\winnt\system32\config versions. How
old are they? Near the date of initial installation? There are also .sav
versions of these (C:\winnt\repair) files in c:\winnt\system32\config.

Also check:
C:\winnt\repair\regback (if present)
Check the same files as before dates.


----- Original Message -----
From: "C-squared" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.win2000.registry
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2006 9:18 PM
Subject: accidentally imported registry

 

[C-squared]

Thanks, I just re-installed w2k as an upgrade and restored my applications.
Luckily I didn't have that much on this installation. Everything seems to
be working fine now.

 

[Dave Patrick]

But this would delete them whether they existed before or not.

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

 

[Dave Patrick]

You probably would be better off to clean install.

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

 

[Mark V]

The easiest way to delete the unwanted registry entries that you
added 1. Open the .reg file which you imported in notepad.

You assume that only *additions* were made. Far more likely that the
merge operation altered existing keys and values/data.

2. Append a - (minus) sign befoe the unwanted keys you imported.
For Ex. If you have add a n entry like,[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\..]
Then Append an " - " sign to it like,
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\..]
3. Save that file as another .reg file like Del.reg and now
import the same or double click this and this will delete the
entries that you have marked
Hope this will solve your problems