The registry

[unixronin]

Once again, a question has come up on the Bacula users' list about restoring just the registry of a Windows box that has corrupted its SOFTWARE registry hive to the point that it won't boot.

I put it to you that of all the "innovative" ideas that Microsoft has built into Windows over the years, the Windows Registry is the worst.  It is opaque, it is fragile, it is difficult to back up, clean out or repair, you can pretty much only repair it from Windows itself which means that it's almost impossible to repair it when — not if — Windows corrupts it, and all kinds of noxious things can be buried inside it by malware.  Not only does Windows periodically outright corrupt the registry, but from the first time you boot a new Windows installation the registry starts accumulating cruft and droppings that gradually bog the machine down and introduce cryptic malfunctions with no readily determinable cause.  Things that worked yesterday just stop working for no apparent reason.

Combine with opaque hexadecimal-string registry key names created by various things, so that you can't even tell what some random leftover registry key belongs to or whether it's still in use, and it's a recipe for disaster.  That disaster has been ongoing for fifteen years now, and there's no end in sight.

The saddest part about the whole thing is that Microsoft actually believed that this massive, opaque, monolithic, unmaintainable monstrosity would be an improvement.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, you can still dump it to a file, but what is dumped isn't precisely plain ASCII text, and I'm given to understand that if you edit the text, you can't guarantee to be able to re-import it because when you save the editied version, what you save IS plain ASCII text. There's no way to save it as importable registry text.

Oh, and when you dump it, it still contains opaque hash keys.

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

That is odd since I've recently copied and pasted reg keys to a file and named it .reg I'll have to try that and see.

I would really prefer something that properly wrappers an install and will then gut all the crap the installed program spews on.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think you can get away with copy-and-paste, yes. I'm not sure what precisely the magic is that breaks if edited with a regular text editor. (And there's always the possibility I'm confusing that part with something else Microsoft ... I have the vague recollection it involves filesystem objects that become files when edited and saved, or sparse files that become non-sparse if edited and saved, or something like that.)