Win2K Recovery Console

You probably know about Windows 2000's Recovery Console (RC), which you access by booting from the CD-ROM and using the recovery options. What you might not know is that you can also use Win2K's RC to fix Windows NT 4.0 installations. My company recently had the opportunity to test this feature.

Our NT 4.0 installation was unbootable because of a disk corruption. We used the Win2K Server CD-ROM to boot to the Win2K RC. After we logged on to the NT 4.0 installation, we ran Chkdsk to repair the system volume. We also could have disabled any errant services that were causing problems. We booted back into NT and rolled back the new RAID controller driver that caused the corruption.

You can install Win2K's RC on an NT 4.0 installation. Browse to the i386 directory on the Win2K media, and run

WINNT32.exe /cmdcons

You can then run the Win2K RC directly from NT.

—David Savoie
[email protected]