How to actually repair a Drivers Hive file

[davbay1]

Hey everyone,

I see so many posts of people uploading their hive files such as Drivers and getting them repaired and then replacing their old ones. However, I was wondering how the repair is actually done. I would love to learn how to actually fix the files myself and improve my Windows troubleshooting knowledge.

Thank you!

 

[Maxstar]

Hi and welcome to Sysnative,

The way to fix a registry hive file depends entirely on the issue and which hive has been corrupted. For example: When the COMPONENTS hive is damaged with [HRESULT = 0x800703f1 - ERROR_BADDB] you can use ComponentsScanner (developed by Sysnative) to scan and repair such a hive file.

When running ComponentsScanner you will see the following:

Loading registry hive from C:\Users\Username\Desktop\COMPONENTS
Parsing loaded hive, please wait...
Sequence numbers do not match! Hive is dirty and the transaction logs should be reviewed for relevant data!
Hive parsed successfully - found 136,659 keys and 430,716 values
Starting corruption scan
Sequence mismatch! Primary = 79252. Secondary = 79251
Performing regedit load test
Hive failed regedit load test with error "ERROR_BADDB: The configuration registry database is corrupt."
Scanning CanonicalData\Catalog for corruptions
Scanning CanonicalData\Deployments for corruptions
Scanning DerivedData\Components for corruptions
Scanning VersionedIndex\...\ComponentFamilies for corruptions
Analysing coruptions
Checking for malformed Deployment keys
Checking CatalogThumbprints & c! marks

ComponentsScanner has detected the following issues that it is able to repair automatically.

        * ERROR_BADDB - sequence numbers are mismatched

Would you like to run the repairs? Your COMPONENTS hive will be backed up before attempting any repairs. [Y/n]

When a registry hive file is dirty and cannot be loaded it means the primary and secondary sequence numbers do not match. ComponentsScanner is able to fix this issue, but only for the COMPONENTS hive. For other registry hive files like the DRIVERS hive there is no (identical) tool available to resolve such issues. However there is a tool called hivex for Linux.

(...) I would love to learn how to actually fix the files myself and improve my Windows troubleshooting knowledge.

To learn more about troobleshooting Windows Update issues I would suggest to take a look at the public tutorials.
If you're interested to become a volunteer here at Sysnative you can sign up for the Windows Update Academy.

But please take into account that the academy is full at the moment as pointed out into the thread above.