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Alex S
Asked: 2015-10-19 01:00:42 +0800 CST

Load, Compare & Diff Registry of Windows Servers & Clients on VHDs?

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We are deploying various Windows Servers {2008, 2012} & Clients {7,8.x, 10} and various custom applications, versions & special utilities.

Without bothering the audience here on specifics of each, we'd like to figure out what tools/ ways could we use to do a 'compare / diff' between the entire or partial registry of various online/ offline instances of these machines.

We can use Beyond Compare to file / folder diff compares between 2 instances, but not sure what can help load & diff/compare between registries of 2 VHD/ machine instances.

windows-registry

2 Answers

  1. If you don't mind Linux, I'd really recommend winregfs. It transforms the hive file contents into plain files and folders that can be accessed and handled by whatever your preferred diffing tool is.

    Otherwise depending on your level programming expertise I guess you could hook into one of the many libraries for the task, or just use a NirSoft GUI.

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  2. I recently did this by exporting the hives using regedit, then using a text-based diff tool to compare the .reg files. I happened to use gvimdiff and cygwin diff, but you could use any source-code comparison tool.

    Edit: Regedt32 can open HKU or HKLM hives if you have the drive mounted. Select File|Load Hive and choose the .dat to load. See full instructions on TechNet or this tutorial.

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