Add Recovery Console as a Boot Option!!

[Ob1]

Since the Recovery Console seems to be a invaluable tool these days when trying to fix a busted pc, i thought this tip might come in handy for those people who will eventually lose there copy of windows or dont want to hunt down there windows disc when they need it the most (after the computer won't boot). this comes in handy specifically on laptops when your away from home and you dont have your disc to boot into the recovery console.

to add the recovery console to your pc running either 2000, or XP simply put your disc into the cd-rom then go to start>run>and type without quotes "X:\i386\winnt32 /cmdcons"

X: being the drive letter of your windows disc (Usually D:\)

it will prompt you stating you are about to install the recovery console, choose yes, it will check for the latest version of the recovery console on microsofts site then install, reboot your machine and now you will have the option to boot into your windows installation or boot into the recovery console without needing the windows disc

one thing i like to change is the default time before windows chooses the default OS to boot into, its normally set at 30 seconds, but i like to bring it down to 8-10 seconds.

to do this boot into windows, go to the systems properties in the control panel, click the advanced tab and choose start and recovery.

You can edit the "Time to display list of Operating Systems" or click the edit button to open the boot.ini file and change the timeout=30 section to 8 or 10 seconds.

If you want to manually choose which Operating System to install without it timing out, then click the edit button and in the timeout=30, change it to timeout=-1 and save the changes.


If for some reason you decide you don't' want the recovery console as a boot up option anymore simply go to the system properties again, choose the advanced tab, startup and recovery, choose the edit button and then remove the recovery console entry in the boot.ini file.

Next, click start>run>type without quotes "X:\cmdcons\bootsect.dat="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons

X: being the drive with Windows installed (Usually D:\)

Open Windows Explorer, browse to the root directory of the drive specified in the boot.ini entry for Recovery Console, and DELETE the cmdcons folder.
(Make sure to enable Hidden files and folders before looking for the cmdcons folder by adjusting the folder options in Tools>folder options>view tab>hide files and folders).

In the root directory (usually is C:\), DELETE the file Cmldr

reboot and you should boot right back into windows with being prompted to boot into windows or the recovery console......