[Dave-H]

rloew, on 31 May 2011 - 12:16 AM, said:

Dave-H, on 27 February 2009 - 01:12 PM, said:

The one thing that still gets me about all this is that MS have always maintained that there is no size limit on the registry in Windows 98 (as I believe there was in Windows 95.)
From my experience, and others, in certain circumstances this is just not true, because of the 16MB memory limitation on start-up, which unbelievably still seems to apply on Windows 2000 as well!

There is no 16MB limitation on the Registry size. I just tested an 18MB Registry. The 16MB limit occurs when the Registry and/or Gigabit Ethernet Drivers take up too much of the lowest 16MB of Physical RAM. I added the /M Patch to my RAM Limitation Patch to insure that this did not happen regardless of Registry Size or type of Ethernet.

I wasn't expecting a reply to this after two years, but thanks Rudolph!

[dencorso]

@RLoew: You talked about a 18MiB registry and the lowest 16 MiB... may I ask, just out of curiosity, at which physical address, even if variable, does Win 9x/ME start loading the registry? Just above the HMA?

@jds: IIRR, the demo version of the RAM Limitation Patch works for 10 min before rebooting... it might be enough, with the /M option, for RegCon to compact your registry (but do create a backup first, and store it safely, of course). BTW, how much RAM does your machine have?

[rloew]

jds, on 31 May 2011 - 01:48 AM, said:

rloew, on 31 May 2011 - 12:16 AM, said:

There is no 16MB limitation on the Registry size. I just tested an 18MB Registry. The 16MB limit occurs when the Registry and/or Gigabit Ethernet Drivers take up too much of the lowest 16MB of Physical RAM. I added the /M Patch to my RAM Limitation Patch to insure that this did not happen regardless of Registry Size or type of Ethernet.

Do the MS 'scanreg' and 'regedit' DOS tools work properly for you with such large registries?

I've found (per above) that 'regedit' does not. As for 'scanreg', it seems happy to backup, restore and "vanilla test" large registries, although I haven't been brave enough to try "scanreg /fix" since my registry has grown beyond the 8M mark that is mentioned earlier in this thread.

Joe.

Haven't tried SCANREG, but REGEDIT (DOS) does work. Extracting and rebuilding the Registry took two hours with SMARTDRV enabled. Without SMARTDRV plan on two DAYS.

Quote

@RLoew: You talked about a 18MiB registry and the lowest 16 MiB... may I ask, just out of curiosity, at which physical address, even if variable, does Win 9x/ME start loading the registry? Just above the HMA?

EMM386 and any XMS TSR's, if any, come first.
The Registry appears to be next.
The VMM32 Modules follow.

The /M Option disrupts this allocation, so that the Registry and VMM Modules are placed above the 16MB range.

[jds]

dencorso, on 31 May 2011 - 11:08 AM, said:

@jds: IIRR, the demo version of the RAM Limitation Patch works for 10 min before rebooting... it might be enough, with the /M option, for RegCon to compact your registry (but do create a backup first, and store it safely, of course). BTW, how much RAM does your machine have?

Hey, great idea! Unfortunately however, it didn't work. RegCon failed with the same error.

rloew, on 31 May 2011 - 10:43 PM, said:

jds, on 31 May 2011 - 01:48 AM, said:

Do the MS 'scanreg' and 'regedit' DOS tools work properly for you with such large registries?

I've found (per above) that 'regedit' does not. As for 'scanreg', it seems happy to backup, restore and "vanilla test" large registries, although I haven't been brave enough to try "scanreg /fix" since my registry has grown beyond the 8M mark that is mentioned earlier in this thread.

Haven't tried SCANREG, but REGEDIT (DOS) does work. Extracting and rebuilding the Registry took two hours with SMARTDRV enabled. Without SMARTDRV plan on two DAYS.

Interesting. So with 'regedit' it seems, YMMV. I can export the registry OK, but not create/import it.

Joe.

[rloew]

jds, on 01 June 2011 - 01:56 AM, said:

Interesting. So with 'regedit' it seems, YMMV. I can export the registry OK, but not create/import it.

I did not try to Import anything, but I did create a new Registry successfully. It just takes a long time. As I noted, make sure you use SMARTDRV or you will be waiting days.
If it fails, there may be other issues, not just size.

[dencorso]

rloew, on 31 May 2011 - 10:43 PM, said:

Quote

@RLoew: You talked about a 18MiB registry and the lowest 16 MiB... may I ask, just out of curiosity, at which physical address, even if variable, does Win 9x/ME start loading the registry? Just above the HMA?

EMM386 and any XMS TSR's, if any, come first.
The Registry appears to be next.
The VMM32 Modules follow.

The /M Option disrupts this allocation, so that the Registry and VMM Modules are placed above the 16MB range.

Thanks a lot!
I've got a much better mental picture, now, of how it works.
BTW, XMS TSRs are rare birds, indeed. I wouldn't even have thought about them here, had you not mentioned them.

[rloew]

dencorso, on 01 June 2011 - 01:17 PM, said:

BTW, XMS TSRs are rare birds, indeed. I wouldn't even have thought about them here, had you not mentioned them.

Not so rare. Anybody's XMS RAMDisk will do.

[jds]

rloew, on 01 June 2011 - 12:56 PM, said:

jds, on 01 June 2011 - 01:56 AM, said:

Interesting. So with 'regedit' it seems, YMMV. I can export the registry OK, but not create/import it.

I did not try to Import anything, but I did create a new Registry successfully. It just takes a long time. As I noted, make sure you use SMARTDRV or you will be waiting days.
If it fails, there may be other issues, not just size.

Hmmm ... the problem is with the import/create step of the procedure. So perhaps 'regedit' doesn't work any different for you as it does (doesn't) for me. And yes, it took over half an hour (estimate) to export the registry.

Joe.

[jds]

I think this thread should be noted here : http://www.msfn.org/...98-seme-topics/

Also, if anyone has any suggestions on how to recreate a large registry from exported REG file(s), that would make this thread even more useful. After all this time, I still haven't found any way to do this.

In theory, the most reliable way to make a registry devoid of wasted space is to export it to a REG file (or files) and then import the file(s). However, while the first part of this process works fine (albeit slowly), the second part of this process fails with large registries.

Joe.

[rloew]

I'm not sure but it may be necessary to break up the import into multiple pieces.

I was able to build a Registry of 19MB by repeatedly importing a synthesized import file containing a key with over a megabyte of value data in it, changing the Key name each time.
I created the large Registry to test my RAM Limitation Patch's /M option that supports large Registries with Windows 9x.

[jds]

rloew, on 24 August 2012 - 11:02 AM, said:

I'm not sure but it may be necessary to break up the import into multiple pieces.

I was able to build a Registry of 19MB by repeatedly importing a synthesized import file containing a key with over a megabyte of value data in it, changing the Key name each time.
I created the large Registry to test my RAM Limitation Patch's /M option that supports large Registries with Windows 9x.

Thanks for the input, Mr Loew.

I also tried this by exporting the individual hives (HKLM, HKCU, etc.) separately, then importing these REG files one-by-one. I used the User.dat (/L) and user name (/R) command line switches to avoid breaking the working registry. Unfortunately, after a certain size was reached (can't recall exact size, something over 8M), importing further hive REG files failed.

Joe.

PS. To our respected mod's : I think this thread should be listed as Important/Stickified/Pinned.

This post has been edited by jds: 28 August 2012 - 09:30 PM

[shae]

Another data point. My registry size (base 10):

SYSTEM.DAT 14.5MB
USER.DAT 3.1MB

[dencorso]

jds, on 28 August 2012 - 09:30 PM, said:

PS. To our respected mod's : I think this thread should be listed as Important/Stickified/Pinned.

Agreed. Done!

[jds]

dencorso, on 29 August 2012 - 05:17 PM, said:

Agreed. Done!

Thanks, Den!

Joe.

[jds]

shae, on 29 August 2012 - 04:35 PM, said:

Another data point. My registry size (base 10):

SYSTEM.DAT 14.5MB
USER.DAT 3.1MB

Wow!

Mine's 13MB and 1.8MB respectively.

I recently deleted dotNet 1.0 and 1.1 frameworks because my system was becoming unstable. I believe that was due to this registry size issue, since I wasn't actually running any dotNet applications, particularly not the 1.0 or 1.1 varieties.

Joe.

[jaclaz]

dencorso, on 29 August 2012 - 05:17 PM, said:

jds, on 28 August 2012 - 09:30 PM, said:

PS. To our respected mod's : I think this thread should be listed as Important/Stickified/Pinned.

Agreed. Done!

Would this imply that dencorso is to be considered among the respected mod's (in the sense of NOT among the UNrespected ones)?



Seriously, a "semi-random" idea, possibly void of any utility, would the offline registry library work?
http://reboot.pro/11212/
http://reboot.pro/11312/
(kernelEx/whatever)?

jaclaz

[jds]

jaclaz, on 30 August 2012 - 06:05 AM, said:

Seriously, a "semi-random" idea, possibly void of any utility, would the offline registry library work?
http://reboot.pro/11212/
http://reboot.pro/11312/
(kernelEx/whatever)?

jaclaz

Thank you sooooo much for those interesting links.

It's taken a while to follow all the threads/leads. I've downloaded 'offlinereg.zip', 'RawReg13.zip' and even 'regv.zip' and 'regs.zip'. I didn't download the "regfs" stuff, because I have my doubts it's a viable option here. I'll try to find if a 9X version of the "Offline Registry Library" was ever released, since at a file level, 9X and NT registries aren't compatible (they don't even use the same file names or number of files). Then I'll see if there's any practical way to apply any of these tools to this problem.

Joe.

This post has been edited by jds: 01 September 2012 - 07:53 AM

[jaclaz]

jds, on 01 September 2012 - 07:52 AM, said:

It's taken a while to follow all the threads/leads. I've downloaded 'offlinereg.zip', 'RawReg13.zip' and even 'regv.zip' and 'regs.zip'. I didn't download the "regfs" stuff, because I have my doubts it's a viable option here. I'll try to find if a 9X version of the "Offline Registry Library" was ever released, since at a file level, 9X and NT registries aren't compatible (they don't even use the same file names or number of files). Then I'll see if there's any practical way to apply any of these tools to this problem.

I will give you some good and some bad news.

There is NO such thing as a "9x version of the Offline Registry Library" (AFAIK, but I tend to be usually quite well informed on this specific topic ).

The Rawreg is (unfortunately) a half @§§ed left in an UNfinished state, and it is perfectly UNuseful.

Still AFAIK the actual file format for the Registry has not big changes between 9x and NT , and since you are going to use offline access to the file(s) the actual filenames (and the way they are combined in an actual ONliine registry) is pretty much irrelevant.
Compare with:
http://paullee.ru/regstry.html
Via google translate:
http://translate.goo...%2Fregstry.html

jaclaz

[jds]

jaclaz, on 01 September 2012 - 09:11 AM, said:

I will give you some good and some bad news.

There is NO such thing as a "9x version of the Offline Registry Library" (AFAIK, but I tend to be usually quite well informed on this specific topic ).

The Rawreg is (unfortunately) a half @§§ed left in an UNfinished state, and it is perfectly UNuseful.

Still AFAIK the actual file format for the Registry has not big changes between 9x and NT , and since you are going to use offline access to the file(s) the actual filenames (and the way they are combined in an actual ONliine registry) is pretty much irrelevant.
Compare with:
http://paullee.ru/regstry.html

That's just bad news, isn't it? If there were a 9X version of the library, then the offline registry editor tool might be rebuilt and hopefully work OK with the 9X registry files. But as an offline registry editor works directly on the files, not the loaded registry via an API, how can an NT version be used, since 9X has two registry files, whereas NT has about half a dozen? In other words, if I were to (re)build NT registry files from exported 9X "reg" file(s), how would I merge the half dozen NT registry files into the two registry files that 9X requires?

Joe.

[dencorso]

The only tool that's able to deal with both types of registry is Regview, by the "General Paul Lee". Version 4.2 is quite stable, although not very intuitive to use: supposedly, if one starts it with no parameter, it would allow one to navigate to the file of interest, but I've never been able to get that part to work OK... when, however, it's run with the name of the target registry file one wants to edit as 1st and only command line parameter, it works like clockwork. However I've never used it to modify multi-string values in the XP registry, so I cannot guarantee it works as advised with thouse types, which are the main difference between the XP and 98SE registries. With the 98SE registry it just works.