Convert on Anything About IT

How to convert registry files (.reg) into XML for Group Policy Preferences import

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:50:26 +0000

Creating registry settings manually within the Group Policy Preferences editor can become a cumbersome task, especially when you need to create many of them. Although the Group Policy Management console allows you to import registry keys stored within an XML formatted file, unfortunately out of the box Microsoft doesn’t provide any tooling to export and convert registry settings into xml.

A couple of days ago I found an online “FREE” Registry to Group Policy Preferences XML converter that looks pretty promising. It’s still under development but definitely worth a try before starting a lengthy manual task.

ASCII Stuff

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:03:34 +0000

I recently got some scripts that were nicely written, meaning well formatted, documented and structured. What I liked most was the clearly visible separation of the main code and the subroutines. The code blocks were separated by ASCII Code based letters as shown on the picture below.

If you go to http://www.network-science.de/ascii/ you can create your own text using the ASCII Generator.

Now that we speak about ASCII, during my little search on the web for the above, I also came across another fancy tool called ASCII Generator .NET. The tool allows converting pictures into ASCII Code.

Converting WIM to VHD

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:35:12 +0000

Today I’ve tested the WIM2VHD script provided by Mike Kolitz a Software Design Engineer from the Hyper-V Team at Microsoft.

In short, the script allows you to create a bootable VHD file directly from Windows 7 installation media, so you don’t need to go through the whole Windows Installation process. Once the VHD is completed, you can move it directly into your Hyper-V System and boot the operating system.

Detailed information about the script can found on the MSDN Code Gallery - Windows(R) Image to Virtual Hard Disk (WIM2VHD) Converter. Note that you must have the Windows 7 AIK installed to run this script. The script provides a lot of optional command line options, the shortest with using all default settings is as following:

Converting VMWare image to Hyper-V image

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:26:22 +0000

Tomorrow there are plans to move some VMWare slices into Hyper-V. In preparation of that i have found the following article on TechNet

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/ef8c12f7-c45d-442e-9a30-c43cd87df3b3/

and on vmToolkit there is a the tool VMDK to VHD converter that should help doing the job, so far for the theory, hope it works out.