How do I get XPs Recovery Console on my Multiboot DVD

[Jotnar]

The closest you can get is booting the XP/2003 Recovery Console and pressing F10 when it asks you if you want to press F6. This will take you straight to the Recovery Console without asking anymore questions. Look on the 911CD.net forums, there was a very long and exhaustive thread about it last year or maybe the year before.

Cheers

[Vigilante]

That can't be the "only" way. As Mazarul has R.C. as an option on his DVD boot menu.

To Mazarul- If I get you right, basically you pop in your dvd, the system boots off the disk and presents you with a menu (this takes a few seconds to get here?). You then select R.C. from your menu and a few seconds later it asks you which install to log in to to RC. Right?

What I'm asking is, at any point, before or after you choose the menu, does XP have to load all the drivers and utilities and such like it does when you want to go to RC from a regular XP CD? Or does none of that preloading take place and you just go strait to RC?

Hope those questions make sense.

I'm trying to figure out if RC REQUIRES loads of drivers and utils and ram drive and all that to be able to run. I'd like to know just how this DVD of yours is laid out and how it works.

Or can you give us a link to a tutorial or something that explains how to make the same DVD you have?

Let's not give up fellas, if somebody creates a boot disk just with RC, it'll be the first one on the net!

[Mazarul]

Sorry for the late reply but I was busy at work.

@ Vigilante to answer your questions, yes I pop my DVD in it loads the ezboot menu and then if I want to load the RC then I choose that option on the list. The RC is only 6.7MB, so it loads under 30 seconds. It does have to loads some drivers and files in ram then I enter "r", then it present me with the options to which windows folder to log into. Some hex editing is required because the RC on harddrive is call differently than on CD/DVD. email me if you still need help on this.

Edited March 14, 2006 by Mazarul

[Jotnar]

The files that comprise the Recovery Console are just the files that are included in the Windows Boot Floppys that you can download from Microsoft. In order to get to the Recovery Console, it needs to load all the drivers that it normally would for setup. Now you can remove some of these drivers and it will load faster or you can add your own mass storage drivers so it will support certain RAID/SATA/SCSI configurations. Even when run from the hard disk, the Recovery Console still loads all the drivers, you just don't see it doing so (also its doing it faster since its on a hard disk).

It would appear that Mazarul is just using a similar technique to what has already been used to boot the Recovery Console from his DVD. He still has to press "R" to get to the Recvoery Console after it loads all the drivers. If a way could be found to go straight to the Recovery Console, that would be fantastic, but it probably involves the bootsect.dat file (unique to each machine the Recovery Console is installed on) and maybe hex editing the spcmdcon.sys file.

The link to the thread I mentioned previously (3 years old... yikes!) is here.

You can download an XP Recovery Console CD that was created about 2/3 years ago here.

Cheers