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The story in a nutshell:
- I use PuTTY a lot
- I back up my file system regularly
- I got tired of Win 10 freezing on me every couple of minutes, so I decided to reset my PC to factory settings (Win 8.1)
- I forgot to export my saved PuTTY sessions from the registry
- I found this post, which kindly suggests to load an old, backed-up NTUSER.DAT file into the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE within the Registry Editor
- The DAT file was last updated in the Win 10 installation I had before resetting to factory settings with Win 8.1
- I get the following message from the regedit:
Cannot Load PATH\TO\MY\OLD\NTUSER.DAT: Error While loading hive.
I can only make an educated guess that it fails to load the hive from this file because the file was last written from Win 10.
I should note that an older NTUSER.DAT file, which roots from the older Win 8.1 installation (before the upgrade to Win 10), does go through hive loading successfully, but it doesn't contain what I need.
Am I doomed to pay for forgetting to export the settings from the Win 10 registry?
EDIT:
This doesn't seem to be a permission issue
My guess it is an ownership issue (different SID in Windows 10 compared to Windows 8.1). Did you try taking ownership of the file? See my answer "I need to set the proper permission for this action".
– DavidPostill – 2015-09-29T08:15:43.037Thanks @DavidPostill, I actually didn't mention that, but I tried that already, and unfortunately it doesn't seem to be a permission issue. – Yuval Herziger – 2015-09-29T08:20:59.427
I have the exact same issue between Windows 10 and Windows 10 "Anniversary Update" (build 1607), and for the same piece of software (PuTTY). For whatever reason, I cannot load the hive from the older version into the newer version. This problem is obnoxious and one reason (among many) for which I wish PuTTY would store its configuration elsewhere. It's the only registry fiddling I need to do when migrating from one version of Windows to another, and it's easy to forget until it's too late. – Ben Johnson – 2017-02-28T02:09:40.680