HOW TO: Install The Recovery Console to Your Hard Disk

If you are like me, its a pain to keep digging out your your Windows 2000, Xp, or 2003 CD to use the Recovery Console. So, it becomes an advantage to install it to the hard drive. Additionally, you have the advantage of it speedily loading into rcon.


Put in your Windows 2k/XP/2003 CD. Go to start, run and type:


X:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons

(X stands for whatever the CD drive letter is that contains the CD).

Click OK.

Follow the instructions that follow. It will install a directory on the root of your system drive that is called cmdcons, a file called cmldr, and add an entry to your boot.ini.

Screenshots to follow.

 

Initial screen

 

Next screen:

 

Sometimes updated files are found. In these cases, you see this screen:

 

Then this comes up. Nothing went wrong, its normal:

 

Then setup restarts again:

 

All done:

 

Your boot.ini will look similar to this:

 

Wow, very nicely done. I'm gonna try it. Thanks Adrynalyne.

 

I've done this before, but I'm fairly certain I've never gotten the "did not complete correctly" error you're talking about. But then, I've only done it on Win2k.

 

It only hapens when updated files are downloaded from MS. I'm not sure that 2k even searches MS for udpated files.

 

I should add that after you click 'OK' on the error, setup starts again for the recovery console.

 

Ah, that's probably it. I use a slipstreamed SP4 disk for installing Win2k, so Windows already has the most up-to-date files kinda by definition.

 

Cool cool Now I've done it the proper way AND the bodged way

Always good to keep a balance in these things