ERD Commander
I recently examined Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell's disaster recovery tools. One of my favorite tools is ERD Commander 1.0, an application that I recommend you add to your disaster recovery kit.
ERD Commander alters the three Windows NT installation disks to display a minimum command-line NT shell and gives you boot-disk functionality for NT. From the command line, you can use familiar syntax to delete troublesome drivers, copy Registry hives to a disk and edit them on a different NT machine, or copy data (although somewhat cumbersome). Table 1, page 214, lists and describes each ERD Commander command.
After testing ERD Commander, I identified several important considerations. First, the ERD Commander installation alters the three NT installation disks, so I suggest you keep your original NT installation disks and use winnt32 /ox to create a new set of installation disks to use with ERD Commander. Second, you can successfully use ERD Commander on both NT Server and NT Workstation (I used an NT Server installation disk set to open a command line on an NT workstation), because NT boots from the disks and not from the system you're attempting to repair. Third, ERD Commander works with only NT 4.0.
With version 1.0, you can create 16- and 32-bit ERD Commander disks. If your system can't boot into NT, you can use the 16-bit installation to create the same three ERD disks as the 32-bit installation.
During the ERD Commander setup, you answer several questions that help you complete the installation process. After setup begins, the software asks you for your NT installation disks, as Screen 1, page 214, shows. The software then prompts you to provide the first of these disks, as Screen 2, page 215, shows, so that setup can install ERD Commander on that disk.
After you finish the ERD Commander installation, you can boot the dead NT system with the modified ERD disks. The computer will display a DOS command-line window. This command-line interface is consistent with the wiint.sif file that ERD commander adds to disk 1 and disk 2 and reads
[Data]
MsDosInitiated = 1
Floppyless = 1
You must purchase licenses for the number of machines you want to protect with ERD Commander. You can download a read-only version of ERD Commander from http://www.sysinternals.com/erdcmndr.htm, or you can go to http://www.winternals.com to purchase the product.
ERD Commander easily recovers NT installations that aren't functioning properly because of errant drivers or corrupt files. The program is a permanent part of my emergency repair kit.