Edit the Registry on a Secondary Drive

How to Edit the Registry when the Operating system fail to boot 

Case:
When the Operating system fail to boot because of registry errors, and  you need to access to the registry in order to fix the error!!

Solution:
Install your hard drive in another computer as a secondary drive and then edit the registry.

Note:  similar things if you have VHD disk either mount it to your system or attach it as a secondary disk to a second VM.

Editing the registry can be done by loading the registry hive files from the secondary drive from within the Registry Editor program running on the primary drive.

 

STEP 1
Click the “Start” button and type “regedit” into the Search field, and then click the “Registry Editor” program.

 

STEP 2
Click “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE” in the left pane of the Registry Editor window.

STEP 3
Click the “File” menu and choose “Load Hive.”

STEP 4
Browse to the secondary hard drive’s “windows\system32\config” directory from the “Load Hive” dialog box.

 

STEP 5

Click to select the “System” or “Software” file (no file suffixes) to open the respective registry hives. Type name (ITmugDC) and click “Open” to open the hive.

 

STEP 6

Click the “File” menu and choose “Unload Hive” when you have finished editing the registry hive on the secondary drive.