Need to view the registry on offline computer?

Did you know that you can access the registry on a computer that is no longer working?   As long as the drive is ok, it’s still accessible.   You’ll need to plug the drive into a working machine – either using a spare SATA port the motherboard or a USB-SATA adapter, something like this:

Once you have the drive up and running, you can then open the old registry file.

From within regedit – you Cana use “Load Hive” from the file menu to open the old registry settings which will be in the following location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM:  %windir%\system32\config\SYSTEM
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SAM:  %windir%\system32\config\SAM
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SECURITY:  %windir%\system32\config\SECURITY
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE:  %windir%\system32\config\SOFTWARE

If you want to open a specific user have – you’ll need to open the NTUSER.DAT file under the user profile folder.

When you’re done, just simply close the hive.