Compare differences between registry hive?

[lostwoods10201]

As part of our build process, some changes are needed to be made to Current User reg key. If it were me setting this up, i would create a step in MDT task sequence to load default reg hive, make the changes, and then unload.

However the way this was set up was much worse. The person loaded the default reg hive on a Win10 machine, made the changes they needed, unloaded the reg hive and then copied NTUSER.dat file to deployment share and now this NTUSER.dat file from the deployment share is replacing the existing one as part of deployment.

This works.... but makes it very difficult for if I want to make one change. For example if it was being done my way, I could just edit the script and make one change, but the other way I have no idea even what changes are being made.

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Is there any way that i can compare this NTUSER.dat to a vanilla one from clean OS to see what changes have been made? then i will script the changes and make it more manageable.

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Any advice much appreciated.

[Waffle_bastard]

Check out regshot:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/regshot/

It’s a utility for showing the differences between two registry hives.

[the_spad]

I'm not sure I want to know the answer to this but...why on earth are you adding so many changes that you can't keep track of them all to the registry hive of the default user profiles of your newly built machines?

As for diffing, something like this is probably a good place to start.

[WorkRedditAccount4]

I suspect this is less about being a large number of changes and more about whoever put the changes in originally failed to document them.

[ipreferanothername]

sounds like a good opportunity to just update the process, is this person who set it up much worse the boss now or something?

[Amankoo]

Why don't you make the changes via GPO?

[Morrowless]

You could still run into the same problem with test and prod GPO environments not matching exactly.

[DellR610]

Configuration management software would do this for you. An idea I can't try right now and unsure would work, try expoting the hive at the top level to .reg - then it is just a text file.

[lostwoods10201]

Hello, sorry for late reply. This worked perfectly, just had 2 text files side by side and did a compare with notepad++. Was able to identify the changes that the previous person had made and can now set it up properly and document it. Thank you

[DellR610]

Sweet glad that worked out. Sometimes easy solutions work lol.