Nichewares & Consulting, LLC

Read or View another User's Personal (HKCU) Registry hive

with Regedit

Under Windows XP, there's occasionally a need to open another user's personal registry hive, the ntuser.dat file within each user's profile. Most often this is due to having a backup copy of a user's profile and using that to restore the user's data on a clean install of Windows. One instance where this is needed is when recovering Outlook account settings. Many times a machine has crashed but the user didn't have any backups, and some settings are stored in the user's personal registry hive.

This process actually uses the Load Hive function in regedit to be able to access the alternate ntuser.dat file.

Here's the process:

1. Launch Regedit

2. Click on HKEY_USERS

3. Under the File menu, click on Load Hive

4. Browse to the old ntuser.dat file and click Open.

5. Give it an intuitive name and click OK (like Old-Reg-Hive)

6. It's now listed under HKEY_USERS->Old-Reg-Hive

To unload it, highlight the entry under HKEY_USERS, and under the File menu, click Unload Hive