‘Error Accessing the Registry’- How To Solve The Issue?

When you want to update your registry or want to merge an additional file to your registry for making some changes to your system, you may run across an error that says:

‘Cannot import <filename.reg>: Error accessing the registry’.

If you also have faced this problem, read on to find out how to solve ‘Error accessing the registry’ error using the methods given below.

What Causes This Issue?

By looking at various user reports and repair strategies given, we have narrowed it down to the fact that this error can be caused because of two reasons:

Registry Editor Doesn’t Have Administrative Privileges:

If you have never opened registry editor, it is possible that the registry editor or the registry files don’t have the administrative permissions required to make the necessary changes to the system.

System Files Corrupted:

Sometimes a suite of corrupted system files interferes with the importing abilities of the Registry Editor.

If you are also facing this error, you can follow the fixes given below to solve this error.

How To Fix Error Accessing The Registry

If you are also suffering from the same error, I will provide you 2 fixes to get ‘Error accessing the registry’ problem resolved.

# FIX 1 (Importing With Admin Privileges)

If you have never opened the registry editor before, or have installed a fresh copy of Windows, it is possible that the Registry Editor may not have the necessary permissions to enforce its import/export capabilities.

If that is the case, you can open the Registry Editor with admin privileges and use the import menu to merge the files.

The steps to import a registry file with administrative privileges are:

1. In the search bar, type the entry Registry Editor and right-click on the search entry, select Run as Administrator.

Alternatively,

Press Win + R to open the Run dialogue, and type regedit. Press Ctrl + Shift + Enter to open it with administrative privileges.

2. At the UAC Prompt, select ‘Yes’ to grant the aforementioned Administrative Privileges to Registry Editor.

3. Inside the registry editor, click on File. Select Import.

4. Use this import menu to navigate to the location of the file you want to merge with your registry. Once you select the file, click on Open to merge it with your current registry.

If you are using CMD to merge a registry file in a .bat format, you need to follow the next given steps.

Press Win + R to open Run, type cmd. Press Ctrl + Shift + Enter to enter CMD in administrator mode.

This should solve the issue you were having with not being able to access the registry editor or merge the files with your current registry.

If this does not solve your issue, there may be deeper problems like corrupt system files.

# FIX 2 (System Restore)

If you started receiving this error suddenly out of nowhere, you may have made some changes on your PC that is causing this error. You need to perform a system restore in order to reverse these changes and fix this issue.

I will show the easy method to perform a system restore.

1. Open Run dialogue box by pressing Win + R. type rstrui and press Enter.

     2. If you have system protection off, the prompt will ask you to turn it on to turn on System Restore.

     3. Once you are inside the system restore dialogue, choose the restore point to which version you want to change it back to.

     4. Choose a system restore point and select ‘Next’.

    5. Select Finish finalizing the restoring process. After some time, your system will reboot and the old state which you chose will be restored.

Using these methods, the error may have been resolved. If it still shows the ‘error accessing the registry’ and does not let you into the Registry Editor, you may have to perform a repair install using a boot media.

# FIX 3 (Repair Install)

You may download the latest update available for your system, or create (or use an already available) a USB boot media to perform a reinstall.

You can use third-party software like Rufus and MiniTool Partition Wizard to create a bootable USB media device.

Here you can choose to keep your files and settings or perform a clean install that will remove everything. Read the on-screen instructions carefully before making any changes to the system.

Conclusion

If you follow the fixes given above, you now know how to fix the Error accessing the registry issue using 3 fixes given above.  Comment down below if you found these steps useful in accessing the registry editor and which method helped you fix this issue.