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How to open a registry file from a crashed computer

Published on August 29, 2012 Last reviewed on January 27, 2020

When a computer crashes and you have access to the old hard drive from your new computer, can you open the registry to recover data stored in the registry, such as Outlook settings, CD Keys, etc?

Sure.

First, find the registry files. If the old computer uses Vista, Windows 7/8, you need to go to [x]:\users\{username}\NTUSER.DAT, where x is the drive letter of the old drive. In Windows XP, you'll browse to [x]:\Documents and Settings\{username}\. (To make it easier later, copy the path from the Windows Explorer address bar.)

You need to open the upper case “NTUSER.DAT” and not “ntuser.dat”.

Note: you may need to configure Windows Explorer to show all files and folders and protected system files to see NTUSER.DAT”.

1. Open the registry editor. You can do this by pressing the Windows key + R and typing regedit then pressing Enter.

2. Select the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE branch.

3. Go to the FILE menu and choose LOAD HIVE.
Load the Old Registry Hive into the new registry

4. Browse to the location of the old registry hive. If you copied the path from Windows Explorer, paste it in now.

5. You'll get a dialog asking for a key name. This is just to identify the registry hive. You can use any name you want – "Dead Computer" works well. 🙂

6. Find the key(s) you are looking for and Export (File menu).

The old registry opened as a new hive

7. Open the exported .reg file in Notepad.

If you are going to import it into the new computer, you'll need to edit it. At the very least, you'll need to use Find and Replace to replace Local_Machine with Current_User and remove the "Dead Computer" key name.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Dead Computer\Software\Microsoft...

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Mabel Hessel
November 22, 2019 1:51 pm
#348

THX

1
Sam
July 26, 2019 9:18 am
#340

For Step 6 the file should be under HKEY_USERS\[file name] for Windows 10

-1
Jamr
July 23, 2019 8:34 pm
#338

Stopped working at step 5

0
Diane Poremsky (@dporemsky)
Author
Reply to  Jamr
July 25, 2019 8:15 am
#339

it didn't ask for a name? Did it open it ok? If it can't open the hive, it should tell you - if it can open it, it will ask for the name. If you have 2 monitors, the name dialog may come up on the other screen.

0
Ron E James D.O.
June 25, 2015 2:11 pm
#151

This was very helpful and not that easy to find.

4

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