Materials: Working complete PC Blank Diskette Student Diskette, "New Boot A Ver 2.0+" Student CD-ROM, "Room 6359" Objectives: The student will learn the basic functionality of the Windows Registry Editor, and Learn the general concepts of the Registry including, The nature of the six main registry Hive Keys, and The nature of a registry key, a registry value, and registry data, and How to use Regedit to find a particular key in the Registry. Competency: The student will build understanding of the nature and function of the Windows Registry and the Windows Registry Editor, and learn how to use the Registry Editor to locate a Key within the Registry. |
Procedures
The DOS operating system was modified during boot up by the instructions held within the CONFIG.SYS and the AUTOEXEC.BAT. Both of these are still supported in Windows 98, but they were at the time declared deprecated. Windows 98 also provided backwards compatibility support for the deprecated WIN.INI (read mostly, but not exclusively, by WIN.COM) and the SYSTEM.INI (read by many Windows kernel files) user definable boot configuration text files that were introduced by Windows 3.x. However, Microsoft expanded the concept of centralizing the location of settings for Windows startup and session operation into a structure known as the Registry.
The Registry is not a text file although it does contain many individual pieces of information that are stored as plain text. The difference is that the entire structure is a data base and is organized as a hierarchy of keys that can contain more keys as well as value=data pairs. The keys are aligned in a raw binary internal hierarchical structure and the value=data pairs can hold raw binary data as well as ASCII text strings of data. Because it is no longer exclusively text, it cannot be inspected or modified using simple text editors like EDIT.COM or NOTEPAD.EXE.
The Registry is not a single file either. In Windows 95/98 it is stored in the same folder as the operating system (usually C:\WINDOWS) within two separate files: SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT. All of the control panel applets are designed to allow the user to make changes to the operating system that will be properly saved into the Registry, in fact that is exactly what the control panel was made to do. However, on rare occasion, some items may have to be manually modified within the Registry and that is why the tool REGEDIT.EXE was included.
REGEDIT.EXE should only be used as a last resort to modifying the Registry. It is by its very functionality a dangerous tool as will be seen in the Registry exercises. Reasons for using it include:
Open the Start Menu and select "Run":
A new window appears like this. Type "regedit" in the text box and press enter:
The Windows Registry Editor appears. It looks like this:
The contents of the top level keys whose names start with "HKEY" which means "Hive Key" are as follows:
Close all open keys and single click on the My Computer entry at the top. Click on Edit in the Window's Main menu and then click on the "Find..." choice. In the "Find What" text box type in "runonce" and be sure that only the "Keys" checkbox is checked then Click "Find Now":
Now the key has been found. Note that the whole registry path to the key is displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the window:
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