Windows – How to access the Windows registry from Linux

Running apt-cache search windows registry on Debian to look for packages that may suit your purpose brings up five candidates. You can make a similar search on packages.debian.org, or search on the Debian packages site (use the “search package directories” form, and make sure to select “descriptions”).

Chntpw was developed to change a forgotten Windows administrator password, but it can view and edit any registry entry. There's a boot CD on the site.

Hivex is a library for accessing Windows registry hives. It's part of libguestfs, a suite of tools to work with virtual machine images from the host. It comes with command line tools to extract and edit registry entries. It supports BCD hives.

Parse::Win32Registry is a Perl module for reading Windows registry files.

RegLookup is a small utility to read Windows registry hives.

Samba comes with tools to access the Windows registry: editreg in Samba 3, and regshell and more in Samba 4. In Debian (only unstable right now), they're in the registry-tools package.

The ultimate goal is to restore the Master Boot Record (MBR) to the hard drive, removing Grub, so you can boot to your Windows partition in the future without stopping at the Grub command line.

The easiest way to achieve this is to boot from your Windows 7 installation media. Use the Repair computer link and choose Command Line. At the command line, enter bootsect /nt60 SYS /mbr. You can reboot your system and it will now boot into Windows.