# Windows Registry Hive A Windows registry hive is a logical group of keys, subkeys, and values backed by files on disk. ## Notebook evidence [[Scanned_20260730-1806#Page 9 — `Scanned_20260730-1806.pdf`, PDF page 9|PDF page 9]] associates registry hives with `.dat` and `.hiv`. ## Boundary Preserve hive role, Windows installation, acquisition path, hashes, transaction logs, timestamps, and parser version. Generic `.dat` extensions are not sufficient identification.