What is a hive?
A hive is a group of keys, subkeys and values that starts at the top of the Registry hierarchy. Hives are different from other keys in that they are persistent. By contrast, HKLM\HARDWARE is not a hive since it is created at boot time and destroyed at system shutdown. The different hives and their associated files are listed in table 1.3. By default, the hives for each user are stored in SystemRoot \Profiles\username\NTUser.dat where username is the user’s logon name. The remaining hives are stored in SystemRoot \System32\config. Table 1.
