CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

3.3. Emergency Repair

When things go wrong with the boot of Windows, you can try booting into Safe Mode to repair the error, but sometimes the system will not boot at all. At these times, you can make a final attempt to resurrect the system or start the installation. If you choose to attempt the Emergency Repair Process, you should be prepared by creating an Emergency Repair Disk prior to your computer experiencing problems, and you should be familiar with the repair process.

3.3.1. Emergency Repair Disk (ERD)

Windows 2000 and Windows NT both allow you to create an Emergency Repair Disk (ERD), which contains a small replacement version of the system account database and a major portion of the system Registry. This disk can restore the settings and list of the devices or services on the system. It can also replace the account database with a copy of the account database that existed when you created the ERD.

NOTE

The ERD is not required when performing an Emergency Repair with Windows XP and newer Microsoft OSes.

With Windows NT, the Emergency Repair Disk is created by the rdisk.exe utility. You can run rdisk.exe from a command window or the run command. This utility updates several system files and places copies of them in a special directory, %winroot%\repair, which can be copied to a floppy disk after updating. The normal rdisk command does not update the SAM and SECURITY files (see Book VI, Chapter 4), but these can be updated by using rdisk /s.

For Windows 2000, the Emergency ...