Win 2K Registry Backup? What's the point?

[fobotcso]

Having just trashed and rebuilt the Win 2K partition (NTFS) on my test/development laptop it seemed a wise move to back up the entire Registry. The installation was as clean as a whistle with:

Win2K/SP4/IE6/Acroread5.1/Winzip7/WMP9/DirectX8/McAfee7/ZoneAlarmPro and that's it. It was as solid as a rock.

The Registry backup was 14MB for all the components.

So, when I trashed it again, it seemed a simple matter to Import the registry and start again. No luck; error message was "error accessing registry file"!

But I was more cunning and had also backed up the entire partition and it is reloading as I write (Only 2GB) using the Win98SE partition on the same laptop.

But what's the point of backing up the registry, as we are always advised and as we always advise others, if when you need it you can't import it? (Tried in safe mode too.)

Any of my fellow geeks got any similar experiences or ideas on this?

[Mac the Knife]

Urrr... Will your Win9x/FAT32 copy of the NTFS partition have preserved all the correct permissions?

As far all this stuff, I us M$'s ERU to snapshot the Registry and vital files periodically, clone C:\WINDOWS to C:\WINBACK and also to a small removable, bootable HDD.

True M$ fed paranoia.

[fobotcso]

Mac, you're quite right to wonder about the FAT/NTFS thing just as I did, but with nothing to lose I went right ahead and it was absolutely perfect. Partition Magic 6 running on Win98/FAT32 could read and identify the NTFS volume of the Win 2K partition and copy it (over USB from an external Enclosure containing a redundant HDD).

The laptop is up and running as we "speak" (as it jolly well should!).

So, with the "clean" Win 2K I tried the Registry restore routine and got the same answer.

So my question remains: "What's the point?"

[stickyb]

Fobotsco, how did you "import" the registry?

Cheers

[fobotcso]

Hi stickby, this is for Win 2000, but other Windows versions are similar.

When you're working in regedit.exe (loaded from Start>Run>Regedit>OK) Click on "File" and click on "Import". The resulting dialogue box allows you to navigate to files of the type *.reg. Any files of this nature are those you have created when you "Export"ed the Registry and gave it a name. You can export the whole registry or just a single key and choose an easily remembered name.

The Registry itself consists of many files in two key locations. They are:

C: \WINNT\Repair
C: \WINNT\System32\Config

You can't muck about with them directly.

If you're working in the more powerful regedt32.exe, the routine is different. Click on "Registry" and then on "Restore". The same priciples apply as for regedit.

My Saga has improved but my question remains. What's the point?

It turned out that during my rebuild IE6 had not loaded properly and had unplugged itself (leaving OE6!). Windows Explorer couldn't load properly either. So an uninstall/reinstall of IE6 fixed that and another registry "Export" was done. An immediate "Import was satisfactory with errors caused by keys in use. (To be expected).

But given that Windows was damaged and, could not be fixed by a Registry Import, I remain doubtful that backing up the Registry will always be useful.