Data swapping between hard drives?

[Trotter]

Oh, well, I can put this problem on the back burner for a little while. Instead of a new hard drive, my wife asked if I wanted to roll my birthday and Father's Day present into one, and then bought me a 19" LCD.

Wahoo!!!

 

[Win2kpatcher]

you could try exporting the registry folders HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software to a .reg file and import them again after reinstalling windows

For the record this will not work. ohhh how I tried and tried. Pretty much I had a computer I was working on which had LOTS of programs (she game me all the CD's though) I was just to lazy to try and install them all..lol.

I had exported those two software keys and the first problem was when you go to import the keys you get an access denied error since the registry was currently active. No safe mode or the like could get around this. So that alone was out of the question..I was determined not to give up...I then got the raw file which contains all the registry entires in XP located at C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE. I was able to use regedit to "load hive" and then I had access to all these old reg entries in the new registry..even after copying each key into the new registry in both places the software still failed to work..Programs install files in many places in Windows so its almost impossible to copy or backup any programs without re-installing them completely.

This is why I dispise MACS so much as all you need to do is copy the application folder and bam you have the program which is very inviting to piraters.