Recovery Commander Gives XP the Boot

What do you do if Windows 2000 and XP can't boot? V Communications has a solution: Recovery Commander, now available as a $40 download from the company's Web site.

Recovery Commander has been part of V Communications' SystemSuite and Fix-It packages for some time, but this is the first time it's offered as a stand-alone product.

At its heart, Recovery Commander is a system backup tool like XP's own System Restore. But unlike System Restore, it doesn't require you to successfully boot Windows to restore your system.

Both Windows XP and 2000, NT-based operating systems, offer little or nothing in the way of emergency boot tools. If you use Windows 98 or Me, you can create a perfectly good emergency boot disk, a DOS-based floppy filled with utilities for fixing the sort of problems that keep Windows from booting. But there's nothing like this in Windows 2000 or XP. The problem is compounded by the fact that DOS can't read or write to the NT File System.

The XP CD-ROM does allow you to boot to the Restore Console, which offers many tools similar to the old emergency boot disc. But most PCs today don't come with an actual Microsoft Windows XP CD-ROM. Instead, they come with a Restore CD provided by the hardware vendor. Many of these Restore CDs offer only one solution to a PC that won't boot: Reformat the hard drive and return it to the condition it was in when you bought the PC. This is a bit like amputating an arm to cure a hangnail.

Back Up and Boot

Enter Recovery Commander. The program comes with an .iso file you can use with your CD-R/RW drive and authoring software to create a bootable, Linux-based disc. Unlike DOS, Linux can read and write to NTFS partitions.

When you boot from the CD, you can restore Windows from either the restore points that System Restore creates on its own or from Recovery Commander's own, similar checkpoints. According to V Communications, these checkpoints contain information that System Restore doesn't bother with, including boot-level files. The support for System Restore points allows you to restore a system that that did not have Recovery Commander installed.

If you can't restore your PC back into booting condition, Recovery Commander offers one more option: Getting your data off of it. The CD contains tools for copying files to a CD-R or an external USB storage device. In some quick and casual tests, I was able to copy the files to an external, USB hard drive, but not to a CD-R or ?RW. V Communications could not explain this failure in time for this article, but promise that they are working on the problem.

Even if Recovery Commander worked properly, it wouldn't be a perfect solution to the XP Emergency problem. That would require a disk scanner and a tool for fixing boot file problems from scratch (rather than just from restorations). But it's a step in the right direction.