Re: Editing Backup Registry?

To both Sharon and the clearly misnamed Brains,None:

Thank you again for your responses.

Amazingly, I've actually made some progress. The media center edition that
came with the machine is undamaged on the C: drive. At this point, aside
from the tedium of booting into one, then the other, I find that the build
on C: is a useful way of working on the H: drive with the crippled XP Pro
installation. I do something to the H: registry, check to see if I've done
any damage (failure to boot, loss of some capability, etc. etc.), and if all
is OK and I've made progress, I get into the C: drive with a boot to Media
Center edition and copy the six config files to a backup location. Then I
go back to H: and make more registry changes.

I built a BartPE disk and used it to study the registries. Discovered that
while some of the places that the software is listed looked right, some
looked pretty sparse. So I did a bunch of registry exports from the dying
machine, from HKLM and HKU, and imported as much of HKU as I could. That
helped a lot. The crippled install now remembers some of my settings. I
can change themes, it remembers that I don't want to hide system files and
folders, it allows me to lock and unlock the taskbar and remembers that I
want a quick launch toolbar. That's the good news. The bad news is that
much of the hardware on the machine is not recognized, and the XP Pro
install seems kind of willfully stupid in declining to do that recognition.
I suppose I could do another repair install now and see if that helps. I'm
missing the *** on my desktop properties that lets me choose wallpaper,
which is surprising to me, but that'll be tracked down eventually.

Before I do that, I'm back to studying the registry. I assume that HKLM
from the Media Center installation on C: will have better information about
the machine than what comes from the old machine with the many years' old
ABIT motherboard. The XP pro install may have accepted some of that stuff,
but it also started throwing out messages about licensing. I'll try it
subkey by subkey and find out what works and what doesn't.

Sometimes I feel like one of those infamous Indian mathematicians who works
out the value of Pi to hundreds of decimal places with a piece of charcoal
on a slate floor. What I have on the H: drive now seems capable of some
work, I can get at my old tax files, for example.

The other surprise to me is that the files and settings transfer wizard just
doesn't work anymore for me. I suspect that when I run it on the old and
dying machine, even though it tells me that it's done the proper job, that
there's something not right with the file. There's an unsupported Microsoft
tool out there that is supposed to allow peeling that onion apart, but I
wasn't able to figure out its command syntax, and I am not convinced it
would do me any good anyway with a crippled registry. Eventually I hope to
apply those files and settings to the Media Center build (which was my first
try that failed and thus set me off on this lunatic quest I'm on).

I'll report on anything significant. So far the only thing I've noticed
that's important is that permissions need to be assigned sometimes pretty
locally to enable importing anything to the registry.

"Brains,None" <noone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23r$272TSHHA.5060@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dear Stand_58...

You may be better off using ghosting software to copy your hard drive over
to the new one in an image mode. That way, you will get an exact copy.
However, there are issues with the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) that
once XP is set up, it is customized to the old motherboard. There are ways
around it, such as just before you go down, deinstall every device in
device manager, and shutdown, ghost, and then when the os goes to
reinstall everything, it *may* do it right.

Your mileage will vary, please look up this option and all it's pros and
cons. We bought a package for one of our users, Laplink pcmover... have
not done it yet, but it's supposed to work. however, you know what sales
people are like.... ;-)

good luck.. let us know how you did it, and what happened.. make a backup
of your old hd for oops recoveries...

j.

stand_58 wrote:
"Sharon F" <sharonfDEL@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e%23JqLY1QHHA.1364@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Sun, 28 Jan 2007 19:22:42 -0500, stand_58 wrote:
<<< Lots of snipping>>>

Thank you very much Sharon, you set me onto exactly what I asked for.

My story is that I have a computer that is breathing its last, (probably
a regulator dead on the motherboard, leaky capacitors, etc.) It's 6 years
old, old and slow even when it was running well. Having to clear the
CMOS before every cold boot ain't the way to live. Anyway, it has XP
Pro on it, along with tons of files, not so well organized, either.

I bought a new computer with XP Media Center Edition on a huge C: drive,
shrank the system partition with some linux stuff, made more partitions
out of the empty space, and now would like to transfer the XP Pro build
to the same lettered partition on the new machine as was on the old. I
decided to do this 'cause the files and settings transfer wizard just
plain doesn't work on the new machine, either it just goes on for hours
and hours, supposedly moving files and settings over, with the disk not
being accessed and the progress bar not moving, or the wizard goes for an
hour and then crashes.

So I essentially copied over the whole partition to an external drive and
then to the new machine (using a Windows ME boot and xxcopy to copy the
files to an external USB drive, and the Media Center edition to get the
files to the "new" partition on the new machine), did a repair install of
XP Pro with SP2 slipstreamed, and what I have on the new machine (along
with a healthy OEM version of what feels like somebody else's Media
Center edition computer) is a very crippled version of my XP pro setup.
It won't save any of the settings it is willing to allow me to make, it
denies the existence of all but the default theme, etc. etc. I figure if
I can manually touch up the registry, I ought to be able to get enough of
an XP Pro install running close enough to right that I can consign the
old machine to the recycler.

At this point, what I'd like are some hints as to where stuff is stashed
in the registry -- what hives to look at, what keys and values to copy
over from the Media Center registry, which to copy from the old machine,
and which to just leave alone from the repair install.

I have a decent amount of registered shareware on the old machine, for
example, I'm hoping that with the correct seeing, thinking, and typing
skills and judicious exporting and importing, I can make this new machine
sort of a clone of the old one -- functionally if not physically.

Any hints that can be offered would be most welcome.


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