Made a huge registry muck-up

[Guest]

This has to be my nicest mess up yet.

Background: I'm a technician at small computer store, client complains
service pack 2 wont install on their xp home machine.

After brief search error was missing permissions in registry keys, after the
2nd missing one and 2.5hours later of installing and doing rollbacks I
decided the reset the entire HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT's permissions.

I removed all the current users with the handy "remove" button and tried to
add administrators and the user again.. but couldn't..here it gets funny.

So I did a reboot and now no appliaction can open because the asociations
are all locked. PC boots to a blank desktop and mouse cursor and i could get
tasmanger open. After trying a few things I gave up and did a windows repair
install: boot from cd -> Enter ->F8 -> R.

Went well till I had to enter the product key (its a valid cd and key) the
keyb doesnt work anymore - it just causes the screen to refresh with a yellow
slideshow'ish effect whenever ANY key is pressed. Also it tries to search for
a agp driver just before that - using the nice opportunity of a browser
window i tried to execute notepad to test keyb - "no ascoiation for this file
type" meaning the HKCR is still locked.

Sorry for the long post.. hope it made sense.
My goal: somehow reset the permissions on the HKCR tree from importing or
recovery console or other method and hope the setup will complete normally.

can anyone give me an idea of where and how I could accomplish this?

(a full re-install should fix, but I don't want to reset a clients machine
back to factory and tell them to go find&install all their appplications
again.)

 

[DatabaseBen]

theres a copy of the registry that you can probably
disect and use at

C:\WINDOWS\system32\config

 

[John John]

Slave the disk in a working NT machine and use the "Load Hive" feature
to load and edit the offline registry. If you use an XP machine you
just use Regedit to edit the offline registry, if Windows 2000 use
Regedt32. http://www.rwin.ch/xp-live/regedit.htm

John

 

[Guest]

Oh sorry forgot to mention:

The files in \windwos\repair has a last modification date of 2004 and are
about 1/2 the size of the current ones

Jhon's idea:

I did that but the HKCR key doesnt support the Load Hive feature, only the
HKLM etc. keys.

Thnx for the responses, does anyone know of a 3rd party registry editor that
might work?

 

[John John]

Those hives that you see when you edit the registry don't all exist per
se, some are child or symbolic links to the real hives. The HKCR hive
is a symbolic link to HKLM\Software\Classes. You will see it in the
remote HKLM/Software hive, load the HKLM hive and you will find it.

John

 

[Guest]

Another thread got me the answer

System restore keeps updated registry backups in the system volume
information folder , finally getting it back together