Editing ReactOS registry hives outside ReactOS?

[Nuno Brito]

Is it possible at this moment to edit the registry hives outside the ReactOS environment?

ReactOS hives have different binary format from the ones used on windows 9x or even NT/XP/2003.

Some time ago I've downloaded reactOS 0.1.2 wich didn't used a config folder yet and was based on INF files - have they become obsolete?

One other option would be to write a reg file with all my changes and then feed them to ReactOS during the start up process, but this is not an effective way for using in ReactOS live CD's since the ISO wouldn't hold this information..


I wanted to automate a process to load these registry hives onto the local registry, add all my changes, unload the hives and create a new ISO.

I'm not sure if this is possible, but wouldn't there be an offline hive editor - preferably driven by command line to allow automation - I know this is probably asking for too much, but would really appreciate any help or ideas on this matter.

After some google and forum search haven't found many conclusive results, so I'm posting here to hear your thoughts on this matter.


Here's russian program wich can edit Win9x/NT registry hives from DOS itself:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfis ... %2fregstry


The source code is available and if anyone is willing to explain the differences between ReactOS and Win32 hives would be great.

Thanks!!

[hto]

> I wanted to automate a process to load these
> registry hives onto the local registry, add all my
> changes, unload the hives and create a new ISO.

Simply change registry sources and build your own binary hives from them.

[Nuno Brito]

Thanks, I'm already downloading the 0.3.0 source, althought it takes a while on dial-up..

[Nuno Brito]

I've downloaded the source code and found the inf files wich will compose the registry:

hivecls.inf
hivedef.inf
hiveinst.inf
hivesft.inf
hivesys.inf
livecd.inf

The livecd.inf is what seems to matter, but how should it be compiled?

I guess "make" is the prefered way, there isn't any other method for creating these hives?

[hto]

> I guess "make" is the prefered way,
> there isn't any other method for creating these hives?

There is hive maker in tools\mkhive. You can build it with

Code: Select all

mingw32-make.exe mkhive

Copy it from output-i386\tools\mkhive\mkhive.exe to (say) Windows\mkhive.exe.
Then run this command:

Code: Select all

mkhive.exe boot\bootdata output-i386\livecd\reactos\system32\config boot\bootdata\livecd.inf boot\bootdata\hiveinst.inf

Where output-i386\livecd\reactos\system32\config -- output folder for hives.
This is how make livecd do it.
And yes, you can add your foo.inf to the end of that command.

[Nuno Brito]

Awesome!!

Thanks again for a really clarifying answer - it certainly saved me a lot of time looking all sort of strange ways for doing this possible..

ReactOS ROCKS!!