How to install the Windows Repair Console from your HDD...

I think this should be stickied, and probably stickied in the Beginner section, as well...

This is extremely useful to people without a cd drive, and without a working XP disc (can't do it from the Restore discs...)

For those of us familiar with Windows, it is extremely useful to have the recovery console available. You can use it to write a new MBR, a new Boot sector, and repair bad file systems, among other things. The options are many, and it can save you from many common causes of BSOD's without doing restore/fresh installs.

It is very easy to set this up as a boot menu option from within your working Windows system; proceed as follows...

1. Open Start menu and click "Run".

2. Type "C:\I386\WINNT32.EXE /cmdcons" into the "Run" box.

3. Allow it to install itself, and the next time you get a BSOD, or fail to boot at all, you will have the "Windows Recovery Console" option in your F8 menu (Safe Mode list).

4. When you use it, when asked for an admin password, just hit enter (Don't know why, but it works...); type "help" for a list of commands and brief explanations of what they do.

For a tutorial on exactly what to do with it, click here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

The two most common command lines for me are "fixmbr" and "fixboot", which write a new MBR and Boot sector, respectively. Also useful is "chkdsk /r" which will fix most file system errors.

Adding the Recovery Console to the boot menu will save you a lot of undue stress, and may save your system. It has saved me a few times, and is now the very first thing I do when I install Windows.

Questions or comments are always welcome...

 

fixmbr writes a new copy of the bootloader in the first sector of the HDD, where the bootloader and partitions record live.

fixboot redoes the rest of the boot stuff, and won't help if you've clobbered the bootloader by installing grub as a part of a linux install.