The registry hives are in use when logged on, and cannot be copied. You can
backup the hives by booting into WinPE/BartPE or a parallel Windows
installation (if available).

If you want to instantly backup the hives when logged on, the best option is
to use ERUNT.

ERUNT and NTREGOPT:
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

ERUNT - ReadMe
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-on...runt/erunt.txt

<excerpt>

Start ERUNT, confirm the Welcome message.

Type in the name of a restore folder where the backed up registry files
should be saved, or click "..." to browse your computer's drives and select
a folder. You can also simply leave the default, which is a folder named
ERDNT inside your Windows folder, the advantage being that you have access
to this folder from the Windows Recovery Console in case Windows does not
boot anymore.

</excerpt>

You can then move the hives to CD.


--
Regards,

Ramesh Srinivasan, Microsoft MVP [Windows XP Shell/User]
Windows® XP Troubleshooting http://www.winhelponline.com


"MS Questions" <MSQuestions@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:945CAF83-D6E1-4DFB-812E-ADB77F569DBD@microsoft.com...
I'm wondering if I can just manually make copies of the registry files, save
them to a CD, and then if needed, manually delete the corrupted files and
just copy the archived ones from CD back to the OS folders?

I know there are all sorts of automated backup solutions -- I just like to
keep things simple and hands-on.

These are the files I would copy -- from Wikipedia:

The following Registry files are stored in %SystemRoot%\System32\Config\:

* Sam - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SAM
* Security - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SECURITY
* Software - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE
* System - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM
* Default - HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT
* Userdiff

The following file is stored in each user's profile folder:

* NTUSER.DAT