CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [294]
If you followed the instructions earlier in the lesson, you’ve installed the Recovery Console onto your system and have it as an option when you boot the system. If not, start it as described earlier, using the Windows 2000 or XP installation CD-ROM. When you select the Recovery Console, you will see a message about NTDETECT, another one that the Recovery Console is starting up, and then you are greeted with the following message and command prompt:
Microsoft Windows XP Recovery Console.
The Recovery Console provides system repair and recovery functionality.
Type Exit to quit the Recovery Console and restart the computer.
1: C:\WINDOWS
Which Windows XP installation would you like to log onto
?
The cursor is a small, white rectangle sitting to the right of the question mark on the last line. If you are not accustomed to working at the command prompt, this may be disorienting. If there is only one installation of Windows XP on your computer, type the number 1 at the prompt and press the ENTER key. If you press ENTER before typing in a valid selection, the Recovery Console will cancel and the computer will reboot. The only choice you can make in this example is 1. Having made that choice, the screen displays a new line, followed by the cursor:
Type the Administrator password:
Enter the Administrator password for that computer and press ENTER. The password does not display on the screen; you see asterisks in place of the password. The screen still shows everything that has happened so far, unless something has happened to cause an error message. It now looks like this:
Microsoft Windows XP Recovery Console.
The Recovery Console provides system repair and recovery functionality.
Type Exit to quit the Recovery Console and restart the computer.
1: C:\WINDOWS
Which Windows XP installation would you like to log onto
? 1
Type the Administrator password: ********
C:\Windows>
By now, you’ve caught on and know that there is a rectangular prompt immediately after the last line. Now what do you do? Use the Recovery Console commands, of course. Recovery Console uses many of the commands that worked in the Windows command-line interface that you explored in Chapter 15, “Working with the Command-Line Interface,” as well as some uniquely its own. Table 17-1 lists the common Recovery Console commands.
Table 17-1 Common Recovery Console Commands
The Recovery Console shines in the business of manually restoring Registries, stopping problem services, rebuilding partitions (other than the system partition), and using the EXPAND program to extract copies of corrupted files from a CD-ROM or floppy disk.
Using the Recovery Console, you can reconfigure a service so that it starts with different settings, format drives on the hard disk, read and write on local FAT or NTFS volumes, and copy replacement files from a floppy or CD-ROM. The Recovery Console enables you to access the file system and is still constrained by the file and folder security of NTFS, which makes it a more secure tool to use than some third-party solutions.
The Recovery Console is best at fixing three items: repairing the MBR, reinstalling the boot files, and rebuilding BOOT.INI. Let’s look at each of these.
A bad boot sector usually shows up as a No Boot Device error. If it turns out that this isn’t the problem, the Recovery Console command to fix it won’t hurt anything. At the Recovery Console prompt, just type:
fixmbr
This fixes the master boot record.
The second problem the Recovery Console is best at fixing is missing system files, usually indicated by the error NTLDR bad or missing. Odds are good that if NTDLR is missing, so are the rest of the system files. To fix this, get to the root directory (CD\—remember that from Chapter 15, “Working with the Command Line-Interface”?) and type the following line:
copy d:\i386\ntldr
Then type this line:
copy d:\i386\ntdetect.com