How to undo disabled entry from command line?

Question

I accidentally used Autoruns to disable several registry entries, and now Windows 10 is stuck in a boot loop. I'm unable to boot into safe mode, but I do have access to the command prompt.

I don't know the exact keys I disabled, but I read that any keys disabled with Autoruns are moved to a subkey of a new "AutorunsDisabled" entry.

I thought to recursively search for "AutorunsDisabled" from the command prompt with something like the following:

REG QUERY HKLM /f Autoruns /s  
REG QUERY HKCU /f Autoruns /s  

However, these queries returned no results.

Are disabled keys still stored in this manner, and would this be the correct way to locate them?

Are there any other ways to re-enable the entries disabled by Autoruns? I unfortunately do not have a registry backup as I'm running a version >1803.

Answer 1

The best option you can have is running the Emergency Repair Disk after adding Autoruns to that as Autoruns has been built to work offline from a startup disk and can connect to the registry of an offline windows instance.. you will have to choose the right user and then simply reenable the disabled registry keys..

HTH
-mario

Answer 2

Hello! I'm trying to perform an in-place upgrade of Windows 10 Pro to 20H2, but it always fails immediately with nothing but the failure message, no error code. So far, nothing I've tried has helped.

So I thought that along with disconnecting all extraneous drives and peripherals, I'd use AutoRuns to disable anything but Microsoft / Windows entries. But apparently I disabled too much and couldn't boot afterwards -- the only solution was to restore a backup.

Obviously I want a better solution than that, and mariora's Emergency Repair Disk with Autoruns sounded ideal. However, it seems to me (and of course I could easily be dead wrong) that when I work with AutoRuns on an offline system, the changes don't get implemented in the target system, because when I reboot, I think I see the same problem.

So my bare questions are: (1) Do the changes made using AutoRuns on an offline system actually get propagated? (2) Is there a way I can restore a saved .arm file to an offline system? That would be most convenient.

Thanks!