Is there a way to undo deletion of registry keys while the machine is still running?

Posted by Oliver Giesen on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Oliver Giesen
Published on 2010-07-21T13:28:43Z Indexed on 2011/01/12 12:56 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 188

Filed under:

Windows

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registry

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data-recovery

[ also posted from a programmer's POV at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3299230 ]

I messed up big time and deleted a large portion of my registry during a programming experiment: As a result most of the contents of HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ are gone.

I haven't logged off or shutdown since this happened. The applications that were already running seem to be coping fine so far but I suspect that after the next reboot there won't be much happiness left...

Also, System Restore tells me there are no restore points even though I'm pretty sure there should have been. Could this be another symptom of the purged registry? I wouldn't have expected this information to be stored under HKCU, though...

Does anybody know of a technique or utility that can possibly restore some or all of the deleted entries?

I'm on Windows 7 Enterprise 32bit.

I'm not really holding my breath but you can always hope, can't you?

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