Yes, there is a Bootable CD and you can make it after successful install for
your operating system, you can use it in emergency situation to repair or
boot to your windows and repair or rescue your files.
Your XP CD is that bootable CD. From this, you can:
- skip MBR and PBR to re-enter HD from C:\NTLDR
- launch the Recovery Console
- do a repair install
How to use System files to create a boot disk to guard against being unable
to start Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314079
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994
That compliments the above (it's a diskette, not a CD, BTW) in that it
can bypass NTLDR and BOOT.INI as well as the items in the boot chain
that the OS CD boot can step over. Not much of an improvement.
Recovery Console has some useful tricks to repair bootability, where
this is due to loss of MBR or PBR, but that's about all it can do. In
particular, it is NOT an operating system; it cannot run arbitrary
programs that aren't built into it (e.g. as ChkDsk is)
None of these measures will help you if there are things wrong in the
99% of Windows code that lies beyond NTLDR.
Further, Windows itself is an unsafe OS if hardware is bad, because it
always writes to the hard drive; when these writes are corrupted or
written to the wrong place, the installation and data can get trashed.
Better is to have a true bootable maintenance OS (mOS), and there are
four choices, broadly speaking:
- DOS mode with LFN and NTFS support
- Linux, e.g. Knoppix, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, other "live" CDs
- Microsoft WinPE
- Bart PE
The first is useful if you are not on NTFS, less so if you are. Same
goes for the second, because Linux can't safely write to NTFS.
WinPE is better, in that it is a truely compatible mOS with full NTFS
support that may run various Windows programs.
Bart PE is the best option for XP, as it supports a wider range of
Windows programs via plugins, and can also use the RunScanner plugin
to run these with respect to the HD installation's registry.
If you do a lot of this stuff, you might find yourself using all of
the above at some point - though so far, I haven't required Linux, and
do about 90% of what I do via Bart.
The other 10% is WinPE for ImageX (a system-building utility), and DOS
mode diskette boot for raw sector editing via DiskEdit and NTFS access
via ReadNTFS (where particular NTFS glitches cause all NTFS.SYS-based
tools to BSoD, thus killing Bart, WinPE and Linux).
Other useful non-OS bootable tools are MemTest86 and BING. If you
have a PCLinuxOS CDR, that has MemTest86 as a boot option, so that's
one less disk to drag around ;-)
See:
http://cquirke.mvps.org/whatmos.htm
Google( Bart PE )
Google( RunScanner )
-------------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
Tip Of The Day:
To disable the 'Tip of the Day' feature...
