Takes a long time to boot to recovery console

[Bob]

Hello,

Is there any other way to boot a XP machine to a set of DOS utilities
other than the XP CD's recovery console? It takes an enormous amount
of time to do this. chkdsk, fixboot and fixmbr are great utilities,
but it seems like it's loading the entire windows setup files before I
get to a command prompt. Geesish!!

Bob

 

[anon]

You could install the recovery console to your machine insted of bootin from
the CD. All you do is put your XP CD in and run D:\i386\winnt32.exe
/cmdcons and follow the onscreen instructions.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Is there any other way to boot a XP machine to a set of DOS utilities
other than the XP CD's recovery console? It takes an enormous amount
of time to do this. chkdsk, fixboot and fixmbr are great utilities,
but it seems like it's loading the entire windows setup files before I
get to a command prompt.

It is loading a base version of XP. It is *not* DOS, but a restricted
set of the regular XP commands, running in a 32 bit system including
NTFS support.

You can get a rather more extensive set (the regular XP Command
interpreter in a non-GUI environment, by booting with F8 and using
Safe Mode - Command Prompt only

If you use FAT 32 then booting a Win98 startup floppy gives you true
DOS. But you have to be careful; FDISK /MBR is OK provided you do not
have an alternate boot code there (eg a boot manager or some boot sector
viruses). but SYS C: is death to the XP boot. I would regard it as a
tool for doing simple file copying and deletion, on a FAT 32 drive only,
- not for serious repair.