registry migration from dead computer

[arhi]

I have a dead computer I need to migrate all the s3d settings from to a new one. Anyone tried and succeeded with this already that can share what registry key's to move? (I have stored both system hives and ntuser.dat personal user hive) ?

Have not tried yet, assume it will be walk in the park but someone maybe save me some trial & error runs if someone already tried it.

p.s. No I don't have a fresh backup of all the settings, it's not huge deal I have backup of all the profiles 4-5 months old but I'd like to get latest ones if I can

[arhi]

move done, could not wait any more .. here's conclusion if anyone need to do this themselves

:TLDR:
1. make regular backup of your profiles
2. MAKE BACKUPS
3. if you don't have backups, you need to copy from your old registry keys

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Simplify3D\S3D-Software\FFF] (and all the subkeys)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Simplify3D\S3D-Software\Gcode]



:LongVersion:

DO NOT COPY ALL KEYS!!!! it will not work, it will behave weird, and who knows maybe the activation backend system will decide you are doing something funny and kill your registration so..

there are bunch of keys, I did not touch system keys, only user keys, on the "dead" computer they are in /users/username/NTUSER.DAT file (the registry files are called "hives")

so, if you have access to a ntuser.dat from your dead windows, copy it to your new one in some temp dir, rename if you like to know what's there..

open regedit and load this file in some temporary place (e.g. click on HKEY_USERS and go to file/load hive, select ntuser.dat or how you renamed it to, it will ask you the name of the KEY you want to load it under, give it some value e.g. OLDHCU and voila, you have your hive loaded)

now under the key you loaded this hive in you will find what, for that user, was HKEY_CURRENT_USER and inside you find
Software/Simplify3D/S3D-Software/ - whole bunch of stuff -

what you want is to export FFF (and everything below it) and Gcode

so click on FFF then File/Export and save as some .reg file
click on Gcode and then File/Export and save as some .reg file

unload this hive (click on the temp key you created - OLDHCU or whatever you wrote and go File/Unload Hive)

close regedit

open the 2 reg files you created with some text editor

you will see that your keys have the "prefix" that's wrong (cause hive was loaded in to other branch of the registry) .. so do a search and replace in the file so that your keys are properly positioned

so to get this:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Simplify3D\S3D-Software\FFF]


you do a search/replace of "[HKEY_USERS\OLDHCU\Software" to "[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software"

same thing for both files

now save & close, double click on files to load this setting into your registry (one by one) and voila when you start s3d it will have your profiles and settings saved.

:PS:
you will notice huge blobs inside the registry, this is because it looks like S3D stores the object data (last loaded etc..) in the registry itself ..

[arhi]

an update - this don't properly work... no clue why, no time to debug ... anyhow ..

you import your old FFF part of the key (follow previous post) and your s3d will have all the old configurations, till you reboot computer, after a reboot - s3d fails to start ... anyhow, the good part is, you use this to load your configs, start s3d (before you reboot computer), export all your settings manually (one by one, can take some hours if you have a lot of them ) and then uninstall s3d, remove all s3d registry entries you can find reboot computer, install s3d from scratch, register etc etc... and then load all the configurations manually (another hour or so depending on how many you have... ) .. you can use this time to "clean them up" so export only the ones you really use and then import only those ones hoping you will never need nothing from those you ignore (this is what I did 'cause my hand started hurting from clicking, I migrated only 12 out of 100+ but I think this is actually good, those 90+ were more / less same, experiments or "I don't even know what I tried there - that's why a >>note<< for a config would be cool addon")

so just a heads up ..

I hope s3d will soon implement that "export all settings as archive" with "import a directory/archive with settings" feature so this type of work becomes obsolete