Reading the registry in dos?

[asm80]

Anyone know how i can read the registry in dos mode.
Not a dos window but in pure dos itself.
Any tips, links or anything will be appreciated.

 

[adholioshake]

Quite difficultly...
The registry consists of a number of files. It used to be just 'user.dat' and 'system.dat' (found in the Windows directory). For recent versions of Windows, these files are found in the config subfolder of system32 (in windows directory). You cannot change these files directly in windows. From DOS, it might be possible to change them, but it depends what version of Windows you have. If you have a Windows NT machine (anything above 95), then DOS is probably booted from a different partition, and it will not recognize the NTFS. If that is the case though, try and get a hold of the NT Repair Disk, as I think this has a makeshift registry editor. However, this is a system disk, so unless you boot from it, the executable will not work.
Hope that was informative...

Adonai

 

[almahtar]

There are tools out there (NTFSDOS comes to mind) that will let you modify an ntfs partition from dos, but they may be read-only... not sure. At any rate, you'll need to find the registry files which (as adholioshake mentioned) are different for different versions of windows. If you can boot to dos, have access to the ntfs volumes (using a 3rd party tool most likely), and know which files to modify you should be golden. Look for user.dat, system.dat, and backups are usually named things like user.1st and system.1st. Make sure to use dir -a when you're looking for them, because they have "hidden" and "system" attributes.

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