I have accidentally overwritten Windows 7 registry with Windows 98 registry before. Had to reinstall. This was during GTA Vice City registry patch. Should have checked .reg file before executing it lol.
A better way to delete the registry is to delete the files itself that contain the hives. They are located in %systemroot%\System32\Config. Other registry-specific files are %userprofile%\Ntuser.dat, which contains user-specific data and %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\UsrClass.dat, which contain per-user file associations. EDIT: After I saw that ThioJoe used the "backup" of the registry hives that are 0 KB large files to "restore" the registry, he essentialy "deleted" the registry.
6:40 All of those backup files have 0KB size. I guess the installation was so fresh it didn't have a moment to actually make a proper registry backup, so there were empty files instead. And, well, you replaced registry files that still had something in them with completely empty 0KB ones, and you broke it even more. lol
PikachuPL registry is backed up as part of System Restore feature, to my understanding. I would ensure system restore is turned on for your PC if you are seeing no registry backups
You guys clearly don't know what a database is. He even said in the video that it's basically a database for all of windows settings. Your feeble minds turned it into the nearest thing you could associate since you seen drop downs and folder icons. The windows registry hive is presented like that with a graphical tool to make for easy navigation, it's a structured set of data with settings presented to you with a gui.
I mean, I'm pretty familiar with how databases work. I've written a DB implementation based on an AVL tree. Filesystems themselves are pretty damn similar a lot of the time. Mostly some kind of serialized tree structure on disk. The registry is very similar to the structure of a regular filesystem, although the key value pairs are restricted to a given type. So as far as I'm concerned, it's pretty much a filesystem within a filesystem, where files can have a restricted type. The access pattern would be the same, as the means to query data would be to follow a path rather than to actually query contents or keys, which is very similar to a database. It's seemingly more similar to a filesystem than a DBMS, and it's indexing would probably be very similar based on their nearly identical access patterns. Regardless filesystems within filesystems isn't uncommon, there are a lot of virtual filesystems, especially in unix and linux.
I really love this new style of "what if" videos you are making, because its everything that I ever wondered about Windows made into an entertaining video! Please continue this and keep up the good work my man!
That was when he was starting out and was trying to make a joke channel. Nowadays, he's generally a tad more serious and tries to give information which is actually useful.
There's likely no significant amount of warnings for the registry editor because it's pretty hard to get to it accidentally and figures you know what you're doing.
My friend was annoyed by Caps Lock, he used the Registry Editor to bind the Caps Lock function to F24. He also binded the Caps Lock key to a bunch of useful stuff that he normally would need keybinds for. For curious: F24 exists in Windows because of back compatibility, but the F12 - F24 keys do not exists in today's keyboards.
It is possible to restore the registry if it has been deleted or if a portion of it is so corrupt that the computer won't boot. The system occasionally makes backups of the registry and puts it in a very secret hidden location. (You have to search Microsoft to find out where it is located.) You need to know the location of the backup and the normal location of the registry. To restore the registry, remove the boot disk from the computer and mount it as an external drive on a different computer. Then copy the latest backup of the registry (noting the file dates) into the normal location. Put the disk back into the original computer and boot it up. If you installed any software after the date of the backup, reinstall it, and check all the settings you may have changed. You should be back in business. This is a lot easier than a complete reinstall (took me 15 minutes) and it is a good last resort before wiping the disk and starting over again.
It was funny. I was working for a company about 15 - 20 years ago and after development getting DLLs from a repository and registering new versions there was a lot of bloated unused stuff in the registry. One of our 'more brilliant' developers 'Nole' wrote his own regclean application to clean up the crap left in there. He walked over with it on a floppy and gave it to a more senior developer and said he had tested it etc. The person took the floppy, and his word and ran it on his computer... and that was the end of that computer. The regclean apparently completely (I mean completely) deleted everything out of the registry so the OS could no longer find parts of the OS itself. It is a story that lives on -- long after the person left...
The registry was introduced in Windows 3.11, but wasn't fully used until Windows 95. Windows is the only operating system, that I know off, that uses a registry. I am careful when I make a change in the registry.
I remember I was following a tutorial on how to do something in registry and then I deleted the wrong folder that I should have and it ruined basically every executable, I somehow managed to look up the internet that very specific folder with its keys and reconstruct it. phew.
I have a program I got years ago (more designed for network computers) and it was called RegTool (not related to any of the virus programs or current programs of the same name) It allowed the user to search across keys and values, delete/replace globally across the registry, create/backup restore different versions of the registry and compare registries (presumably to diagnose a faulty computer I assume) My Windows 98SE had slowed down considerably over the years and I found quite quickly that uninstall does not remove many keys and values from the registry. I used this tool to search and remove them and then used a registry cleaner to mop up after. I ended up with at least half the number of keys and values and the speed was dramatically improved. It too had a disclaimer including an example someone that tried doing search and replace changing every instance of the word "Windows" with something else...the warning was "you WILL destroy Windows...count on it".
I tried going into the registry in a vm and after I deleted some folders I started changing everything to 69. It showed the same error as in the video when booting up.
That moment when you mess up your old notebook laptop and you deleted the UI itself so you have to use ctrl alt delete with the task manager to get around.
It's for reasons like this that if something bad was to happen to my computer that I right away ordered backup recovery software from my computers manufacture so I could do a factory reset if the worst was to happen. This way I don't have to pay a computer shop to reinstall my operating system. I always store my data on external storage. So I never have to worry about losing that info. And even so, every couple of years I like to do a fresh install of my operating system to help wipe out all the garbage that doesn't normally get deleted during normal maintenance cycles.
On the one hand, it's great fun to see what happens if the Registry is deleted. On the other hand, it's pathetic that one of the largest pieces of software in terms of lines of code, distribution, regular use at many different levels etc., relies on a virtually unprotected, outdated and poorly backed-up 'tissue paper' database. How old is Windows now (rhetorical question)? Old enough for under-grad kind of trash such as this to have been developed out of it. Is the Registry in the Enterprise edition so exposed to destruction? I use Erunt to back my Registry up at the start and end of each session. I keep the backups off-machine, but to be honest, I don't know that even Erunt saves the Registry in full, YMMV.
I could be wrong, but don't hackers want to USE victims' computers? Either as a botnet or for stealing information/redirect/ads/ransom. Destroying one computer doesn't seem to useful. Also, regedit requires admin privileges, virtually identical to sudo. You might as well say *nix is unstable/crap because sudo can delete /.
me: deletes the windows registry me: downloads MEMZ trojan to not get caught my teacher on go guardian: uhh what's happening to your computer. me: I dele- I MEAN I think my computer has a virus. teacher: ok.. bring it to the office me: ok also me in the halls: Mission passed + respect
I'm not sure deleting the whole registry from the registry editor is a good approach. I think what you'd want to do is just delete whatever files the registry is stored in completely (using another OS if needed), and get the same effect for a lot less work. That said, I wonder what parts of the registry could be deleted without making Windows unbootable? What would be the minimum configuration needed to get it running? I would say it's definitely possible to get that installation working again, though. The main thing keeping it from getting any further into the boot process is the total lack of understanding what kind of hardware it's even running on. Windows basically has no idea what kind of chipset drivers to even use to read the hard drive once control is handed off from the BIOS now. Deleting the registry now is like if you deleted the WIN.INI file in Windows 3.11 that tells Windows what video card driver to use, only worse because there's no DOS underneath it running IO.SYS. So if you really wanted to get the installation back, you would only need a working copy of the registry from an installation of Windows on equivalent hardware. The easiest way to get that would be to reinstall Windows on another hard drive using the same machine, then take that version of the registry and put it into the broken installation. Granted, you would have to do more work to get programs dependent on the registry that didn't come with Windows to work again, entering and creating a bunch of registry keys they require by hand, but it can be done. A fresh installation of Windows would certainly be easier, but if you can get access to the file system, you can fix it eventually.
Video idea: 10 DUMB Ways To Destroy Your Windows Installation I mean if you plan to reinstall windows you may want to destroy old one before formatting PC.
It would be nice if RegEdit showed which program installed which key, or, if a key was modified, what the original setting was. Also would be nice if it showed which keys were made/edited by an admin/user. And if you could search for those things specifically.
Going out of the realm of software, I’d like to see what happens if you open up your PC, take a wire and connect 1 end to one of the pins on a RAM chip, then touch the other end to random pins on the RAM chip. Same thing applies to other chips on the motherboard.
6:25 if u did this on a fresh install you had to make sure system restore was on as those 'backup' registry files u used were ZERO Kb. you need to create a system restore point which gets created the minute u install an update or anything significant like office. so you could ha e fixed this, you jua5 didnt prep for the video i guess or simply sisnt know this little nuget of undocumented info also system restore is not always on by default on a fresh inatall of windows especially with the many flavours of 10 from memory 1509 had it off after a fresh load but turned on after updating. had u ran system restore by invoking it from winpe you would have fixed this. wildows is pretty hard to break.
@@fatihyldz2283 listen my son. thou shalt procure a new windows 10 iso and thou shalt test my word on a hyperv machine on said machine with said iso and thou shalt learn from thy lesson and pray thou not cross thy God's path.
Windows "uh what a great day" ThioJoe "deleting everything" Windows "why me" Gigabites "999999999 GB" Games "oof" ThioJoe "OK done" Windows "no don't do it" ThioJeo "presses button""bye Windows
What might it look like if you could delete every single file that *isn't* critical to running the system? Stuff like icon art and maybe secondary backup files
