Restoring Layers with Lost Registry

Restoring your Virtualized Apps when there is no way of recovering their registry settings is a difficult scenario. Here's some help.

Imagine a case where you had been prudent enough to save your File Redirect location on another drive (eg. D:\fslrdr), but your system drive (eg. C:\) crashed/formatted/over-written by a corrupt image (anything that renders the registry un-recoverable).

Now you want to salvage the layers which have your hard-work saved in them.

Here's a step-by-step approach:

• Rename D:\fslrdr to D:\fslrdr_0 (or anything else)
• Re-create the layer by capturing its installation afresh (yes, this step isn't avoidable now considering the registry is lost).
• Make sure to as closely match the new settings (the settings are the most common content of program registry) to the ones you had in your lost installation.
• De-Activate this layer
• Go to the new File Redirect folder and overwrite the new RO and RW locations with the old ones from D:\fslrdr_0

The names of the folders will NOT be the same in old and new locations! You need to keep the new IDs as folder names. Layersize Analyzer can be used to know the new RO and RW sub-layer paths. Rename the old RO and RW folders to the new IDs and then overwrite the old folders with the new ones.

Thanks Erik for your idea of putting this together.