NT gets a BSOD when you sneeze at the drivers/config. We have to do some upgrades on some NT boxes, but, first, we need to make sure we can recover from a system that can’t boot. This site started out with NT (cough… ntadmintools.com), but it has been a long time. Many Linux and Windows 2000 boxes since then, and we are rusty. A glance around the web, and it is the same old problem, especially with recover. What does it look like? How do you test it? The next few articles will cover some recovery options. One thing that has made the world of NT recovery more snuggly is that Windows 2000 can boot a recovery console that will work with NT.

Let’s create a boot diskette and test it. First, format a floppy *from NT* (start->run->format a:) :

For this particular system, we just need to copy ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini to the floppy. Test the floppy by rebooting. Make sure your bios is set to boot from the floppy first. On ours:

Just for fun, let’s rename ntldr to ntldr.bak. That should cause some unhappiness:

Sure enough, if we reboot from the hard disk, the boot fails, but our trusty boot floppy works. For info on how to use the Windows 2000 recovery console to do this, see this article.