Using an alternate ERD

by Ron Nutter

March 13, 2001 —

I have had an NT 4 server crash on me and now it resorts to a blue screen every time I try to start it up. The message I receive says that it cannot find the boot device. I know that I had run an RDISK at some point but can't find the emergency repair disk (ERD) for that server. Is there anything I can try without having to reinstall NT and restore it from tape?

-- Via the Internet

Yes, there is. Microsoft Support has an alternate ERD. The first step involves booting your server from a DOS diskette. If your primary partition (where the NT files are kept) isn't a DOS partition, you will need to get a copy of NTFSDOS Professional. This utility will allow you to boot the server from a DOS diskette and then run the utility on the newly created diskette. This will give you command-line access to your NTFS partitions.

Once you get access to the drives, go to \WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG. Look for two files, "CONFIG.LOG" and "SYSTEM." Don't be concerned if you are unable to see the .log file at first. Use the attribute command, which will enable you to remove the hidden and system attributes from the file. Copy both of these files to a freshly formatted DOS disk. Boot the server from the WINNT CD and select the repair option. The disk you created earlier with the two files will serve as your ERD disk. Make sure that only SYSTEM repair is selected. After you have gone through all of the screens and rebooted, your server should be back online.

Keep in mind that this process may erase some services in the services applet in the control panel. You may also have problems starting and may need to do some further debugging. An alternate ERD is only as good as the last time you ran an RDISK. Once you have the server up and running again, rerun RDISK. You will want to have an updated ERD the next time you encounter problems.

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