Classic Shell: Forum

Hi! I've never made an XML export of my settings and now it's too late. Right now I'm recovering stuff from a b0rked Windows install. The files are 99% there. It's just that I can't boot into Windows from this drive anymore, so that means I'm unable to do the XML export.

Where does a Classic Shell installation normally store it's settings? I looked in AppData, ProgramData and Program Files x86...but no luck. Overwriting the new DataCache.db with the old one doesn't seem to have an effect, but maybe that's because I'm using a different username on the new drive so the paths don't match? If it's the registry: I'm ok with mounting registry hive files, but I would appreciate some hints as to where to start looking.

Really sorry if I'm being stupid and overlooking the obvious. I'm under a lot of stress to get the system up and running again.

The settings are stored in the registry in HKCU\Software\IvoSoft

So, here's what I did:

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1. Closed Classic Start Menu
2. Temporarily loaded the old registry hive. Make sure you unhide system files in folder settings so you can actually find ntuser.dat
3. Exported the old and new Classic Start Menu registry branches to file
4. Created a copy of the old branch and renamed it restore.reg
5. Opened the restore.reg and compared it with new.reg
6. Did a search/replace to correct the paths. They were different, since I mounted the old hive in a temporary branch. Plus I used a different username.
7. Triple checked all the paths!
8. Deleted the new settings branch from the registry (remember: I made a backup)
9. Imported restore.reg it into the registry
10. Started Classic Start Menu
11. It's alive! All my old settings are applied

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Thank you very much for your help Ivo!!

If anyone else is reading this in the future: If you don't feel comfortable with the steps above, do not attempt it. Messing with the registry is pretty risky. If you insist, you might want to practice this first in a virtual machine.