Emergency Boot Disk
When Vista won’t boot and before you can determine what repairs are needed, you’ll want to boot the suspect machine to try to see what’s gone wrong or what may be missing. For this job, the command line facility in either the WinRE or WinPE boot UFD can help. Use it to look for specific files at the root of the system drive such as bootmgr, bootsect.bak, and so forth. Use it to check system disk integrity with chkdsk or chkntfs, or check OS files with the sfc /verifyonly command (works only on the WinPE version). As you learn more about the tools available to you at the Vista command line, you’ll also learn how to use them to check and repair your system as well.
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Prev Page Common Uses for WinPE and WinRE - Startup Repair - Tom’s Guide Next Page How to Delete Protected Files - Windows PE - Tom’s GuideEd Tittel is a freelance writer, trainer, and internet consultant. His work has appeared on many sites, including Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, TechTarget, and more. He has also contributed to multiple books, including the "For Dummies" series, where he wrote about HTML, HTML4, XHTML, XML, and CCS. He was also series editor of the Exam Cram books until 2005.
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masterwhitman What, no mention of BartPE or UBCD4Win (Ultimate Boot CD for Windows)? These are two projects that are vastly superior to Microsoft's method (both are built on WinPE but have expanded capabilities) and are far easier to use.Reply -
when I saw this I thought it was going to be a review of Bart's PEBuilder... It's saved my a$$ many times. Far superior to WinPE...Reply
How about a comparison/companion article? or an article on tools gearheads & techies find indespensible? -
average joe Vista's PE is far more advanced than XP's. The BartPE project is based of XP's PE. Barts is amazingly useful and I can't wait till they move to from PE 1.1 to PE 2.0.Reply
Some "fairly new" systems will not boot from usb so always carry a cd version as a backup. -
"I usually grab Imagex.exe and the Package Manager using the commands shown in the next screen capture."Reply
Hmmm... I don't see a 'next screen capture' showing the commands used to get imagex and Package Manager. -
LightWeightX Good start to the guide until you get to the WinRE. In section 5, step 2, you describe using imagex and the secret is the number 2 argument however you do not give an example of the command. In the WinPE you use a 240 MB partition, then in WinRE you state you need at least 512 MB.Reply -
sdybas Show us howto "use imagex to grab the Windows RE image from the Vista-installation media." Thanks.Reply -
Good article, but it makes a few omissions and goofs here and there.Reply
1. For using imagex to grab the WinRE image, check out this link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/winre/archive/2006/12/12/creating-winre-using-waik.aspx
2. "x64" won't work when you're using copype.cmd - it has to be "AMD64". Just replace all instances of x64 with AMD64 in this procedure, and it'll work.
3. For the image showing how to grab imagex and the package manager, click on the picture above the text to open up the gallery, then click one pic forward.