How do I remotely create an Emergency Repair Disk?

A. You can schedule an ERD creation using
at \ /interactive /every:M,T,W,Th,F %windir%system32rdisk /s-

It may be preferable to store the contents of this disk on a location at the server, so the following batch script could be used:

%windir%system32rdisk /s-
net use z: \temp /persistent:no
if not exist z:%computername% md z:%computername%
copy %windir%repair*.* z:%computername%
net use z: /delete
exit

This would then be submitted as
at \ /interactive /every:M,T,W,Th,F \ERD.BAT

You could also just put the call to ERD.BAT in the login script so the contents of the repair disk will be updated every time the user logs on.

If you notice that the setup.log file does not always get copied to thedestination. Changing the attributes to -r -s -h before copying and changingthem back after seems to make the difference.

A more supported method is to use a software product such as ERDisk from www.aelita.com.

Harlan Springett also submitted the following:

From each workstation, at staggered times, call this cmd script
on the remote computer (MachineNameExample1) using the scheduler
service and run the job under an administrator's account.

Create an ERD folder somewhere on 2 networked machines
and share the folder(s) as \MachineNameExample#ERD$
This cmd script would be at one of them and named ERD.cmd
Set the names of these 2 machines on the 'set=' lines for
the placement of the ERD copies.

ERD.cmd contents:

@echo off
setlocal
set ERD_PREV=MachineNameExample1
set ERD_CURR=MachineNameExample2
echo Backing previous ERD set to \%ERD_PREV%ERD$%computername%...
echo.
xcopy \%ERD_CURR%ERD$%computername% \%ERD_PREV%ERD$%computername%
echo.
echo Updating local system ERD set...
%windir%system32rdisk /s-
echo.
echo Backing current ERD set to \%ERD_CURR%ERD$%computername%...
echo.
xcopy %windir%repair \%ERD_CURR%ERD$%computername%
endlocal
exit