Remote Administration For Windows » Boot

Create a Windows rescue disk

Steve Wiseman — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:27:13 +0000

A few days ago a friend of mine called me. He said he had a small problem with his laptop, and was wondering if I could help him over the phone.

You get the idea. Not an easy problem.

He brought the laptop over, and I determined the cause of the blue screen: it was a corrupted registry hive.

Panic started to set in. He needed some word documents he was working on earlier in the day – and needed them for a class he had that night!

I was pretty sure the data was there, but how could we get to it? If it was a desktop machine I could pull the hard drive, and connect it to my machine.

I pulled out an old favorite of mine, BartPE

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
(Scroll down to the middle of the page for the download link)

What is it? BartPE will create a special boot disk that runs a compact version of Windows XP – without any need for a hard drive.

It is perfect for recovery operations like this.

To get Bart PE to build a disk for you, you will need a copy of Windows XP professional. It needs these files from Microsoft to create your boot disk.

You can burn it right from the app, or create an ISO for later use.

I almost forgot the best part – it is free

I built a boot disk from BartPE, and booted his laptop with it. Within moments I was able to copy his important files to a flash drive.

Even better, I was able to go into the c:\windows\restore folder and copy the corrupted hive over to c:\windows\system32\config

Now his system could boot again. He only had to install a few apps again to get it back to normal (The software hive we recovered was a few months old)

I have been using this utility for years. What type of windows boot disk do you use?

Reduce your Windows 7 Boot time

Steve Wiseman — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:53:23 +0000

Over the holidays I had the joy of cleaning up a few computers. It is surprising how fast a system can get loaded with software that increases boot time.

Normally I cleanup by hand using msconfig, and regedit. I was tired of disabling critical software by accident (Like printer helper apps), so I searched around, and I found a tool that allows you to visualize how each program impacts your boot time.

It is called Soluto, and you can download from here:

http://www.soluto.com

The install is simple. Download and run the setup file:

Reboot your system, and it will analyze all of the processes that launch at boot time. The cool part is that it looks up each application in a database that is updated by users like yourself – it has a built in wiki editing tool to update information about apps it does not recognize:

When it is finished, you can see all of the programs that impact your boot time. It shows you an exact boot time, and how much time each application takes to launch.

The application is crisp, and almost fun to use. The amount of detail on each application is amazing. The color coding will keep you from making mistakes – something easy to do when you are plunking away while drinking your third egg nog.

When you want to keep an app from running, simply pause it. It will never run again unless you manually launch it.

With a few quick clicks you can pause the applications you don’t need and dramatically reduce your boot time.

Nice tool, best of all it is free – definitely worth the download.

Create a bootable flash drive

Steve Wiseman — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:35:27 +0000

I came across an interesting utility called UNetbootin. It allows you to create bootable USB drives for many flavors of linux – but the part that interested me was the additional utilities you could write to a flash drive:

Parted Magic – a partition manager that can resize, repair, backup, and restore partitions.

SystemRescueCD – a system repair, backup and recovery tool.
Super Grub Disk – a boot utility that can restore and repair overwritten and misconfigured GRUB installs or directly boot various operating systems

Dr.Web Antivirus, F-Secure Rescue CD, and Kaspersky Rescue Disk – which remove malware from Windows installs.
Backtrack, a utility used for network analysis and penetration testing.

Ophcrack – a utility which can recover Windows passwords.

NTPasswd – a utility which can reset Windows passwords and edit the registry.

Gujin – a graphical bootloader that can also be used to boot various operating systems and media.

Smart Boot Manager (SBM) – which can boot off CD-ROM and floppy drives on computers with a faulty BIOS.

FreeDOS – which can run BIOS flash and other legacy DOS utilities.

There are many utilities like this. This one stood out because it automatically downloads all the files needed – no need to dig around and find the ISO.

Simply download the app, and run it:

Make your selection:

Click OK, and it will build your flash drive:

Once it is complete, you can boot from it.

Awesome little utility – perfect for making a rescue flash drive that you can bring with you to family events…when you get that “Could you look at my computer…” question.

Check it out at:

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Install Windows 7 from a USB Memory Stick

Steve Wiseman — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:24:44 +0000

About a year ago I purchased a nice little machine from ASUS.
It is an Atom N270:

When I opened the box, the machine was preloaded with Windows XP. It performs well with XP, and has 1 GB ram, and a 160 GB hard drive. A big mistake I made was installing Vista on it – Very slow.

It only took about a week of pain before I switched back.

So, after hearing all of the big excitement over Windows 7, I wanted to see if it was any better, or faster on this less than powerful machine.

A problem with that is that I do not have a USB DVD/CDROM drive right now, and as you can see from the picture – there are no drives built into that machine.

This means I need to install from a bootable USB memory stick.

I was able to do it, and while I was at it I wrote down what I did so you can too.

What you need:

Copy of Windows 7, and A running version of Vista, Windows 7, or 2008, and a Memory Stick that is at least 4GB in size.

Preparing the USB Memory stick

First, the memory stick needs to be prepared. Make sure you don’t have anything important on it since it will be totally erased.

Put your USB disk in the computer, and wait for it to be recognized. Then get to a command line (Make sure you run that as an administrator)

Type:

DISKPART

This will launch the disk partition program. You need to be real careful here since you can blow away partitions and drives of any drive on your system. Start out by listing the current drives on your system

LIST DISK

You should be able to identify your drive from this list:

So looking at the list, I know that DISK 1 is my flash drive. Make sure you properly identify your drive, or risk destroying important data.

Next, lets run the commands that will prepare your drive.

Note that disk1 is what we determined before. If by chance you have a nice fat USB hard drive sitting on your desk and it happens to be disk 1, and not your flash drive – you will erase everything!

Be careful!

Type this into DISKPART:

select disk1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

Now your flash drive is bootable.

Copying the Install Disk

Now the disk is bootable. Get your Windows 7 Install disk and copy the entire disk to your flash drive. With my computer, F: was the flash drive, and G: was the DVD ROM drive with the install disk. Copy the files from the command line like this:

xcopy g:\ f:\ /s/e/f

Installing From Flash

Now, reboot and go into your BIOS and make sure it is set to boot from flash devices. I wish I could create a nice tutorial for this but there are so many different BIOS menus it would be difficult. Here is what mine looks like:

So make sure it is the first boot option, and you should be ready to install Windows 7 right from a flash drive. Save your changes, reboot…and install goodness will commence.

So you may be asking. How fast is it? Is it slow as Vista or Better than XP? I will let you know next time

Clean boot into Windows 2008, and Vista

Steve Wiseman — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:11:26 +0000

I was troubleshooting a server yesterday and a came across an easy way to clean boot into Vista, or 2008. When I say clean boot I mean that Windows starts without any 3rd party services running.

To do it, startup MSCONFIG, (Start then run…type msconfig.exe)

Once it launches, move over to the services tab:

Then move down, and hide Microsoft services (We don’t want to disable those)

After you do that, click the “Disable Services” button on the right:

Now click OK, and reboot. When Windows restarts, no 3rd party services will be running.

Once you have completed your troubleshooting you can reverse the process to turn them back on.