Using the RC to Solve Common Problems

You can use the Recovery Console (RC) to solve some problems and make some repairs that you can't resolve with an Emergency Repair Disk (ERD) or Safe Mode. Three of the more common tasks the RC can help with are deleting a pagefile, disabling a driver or service, and recovering the SYSTEM hive.

How to Delete a Pagefile
A failure during Windows 2000 or Windows NT 4.0 Setup (or service pack installation) sometimes produces a very small temporary pagefile that prevents the OS from creating a larger, permanent file. When this happens, the OS boots and uses only the temporary file, which slows performance to a snail's pace. You can't delete the temporary pagefile while the OS is running because the file is open and in use. Worse, when a temporary file exists, the OS won't create a permanent pagefile even after you configure a permanent, correctly sized pagefile. You can use the RC to delete either a temporary or permanent pagefile, but the procedure isn't exactly straightforward:

1. Before you boot to the RC, verify the exact location of the temporary or permanent pagefile. Both Win2K and NT 4.0 place a permanent pagefile at the top of a partition and a temporary pagefile in the system root. In Windows Explorer, search for a file named pagefile to identify the partition and directory of a permanent or temporary file.



2. Set the default location to the location of the pagefile. If the pagefile is in the root of the C partition and C is your default partition, go to the command prompt (C:\). If the pagefile is in the system root and your system root is \winnt32, enter

cd C:\winnt32

3. To make the pagefile visible to the RC, you need to overwrite it with the contents of another file. To do so, copy any file to the same location as the pagefile and rename the copied file to pagefile.sys. For example, to copy and rename a file called help.txt, you'd type

copy help.txt pagefile.sys

4. Type

delete pagefile.sys

to delete the pagefile that you just created.

5. Use the Exit command at the RC prompt to restart the system. When you reboot, Win2K notices the absence of the pagefile and uses Virtual Memory settings from System Properties, Advanced, Performance Options to recreate it. On my Win2K notebook, this procedure also created a new hiberfile.sys file that Win2K uses to save the OS state during hibernation.