XP Recovery Console: Installing it as boot option makes sense

One trick I often recommend is to install the Recovery Console locally, on one's hard drive, as a boot option. It's faster than booting the CD (and providing drivers by hand), and can get you out of many a tight spot.

To install the Recovery Console locally, you'll need the Windows XP installation media—the CD-ROM or network repository where the install files are located. To install it, go to the \i386 directory on the install media and type winnt32.exe /cmdcons.

A Windows Setup dialog will appear, and after you click to confirm this is what you want to do, Setup will copy the Recovery Console files and drivers to the /cmdcons directory, and then add a new option to your boot menu labeled "Microsoft Windows Recovery Console." Now you should be able to get into the Recovery Console simply by selecting that option from the boot menu.

However, you may not be able to install the Recovery Console locally if your installed copy of Windows XP is of a newer Service Pack level than the install media (e.g

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., your CD is Windows XP SP1, and you're now running Windows XP SP2).

If that's the case, you may get this error: Setup cannot continue because the version of Windows on your computer is newer than the version on the CD. There are three ways to get around this issue:

To do this, copy the contents of the \i386 folder on the CD to a directory on the hard drive (such as WINXP), and then unpack the network installation version of SP2 into that folder using the /integrate:c:\ command-line option (where is the directory you copied the \i386 folder into).

Once you've done that, run winnt32.exe /cmdcons from the \i386 folder on the hard drive to set up the Recovery Console.

I'll explore some other not-so-obvious problems that can plague installations of the Recovery Console in future tips.

About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Power Users Newsletter, which is devoted to hints, tips, tricks, news and goodies for Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP users and administrators. He has more than 10 years of Windows experience under his belt, and contributes regularly to SearchWinComputing.com and SearchSQLServer.com.

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