For System Recovery, DOS Is Still Boss

Even with all its faults--and there are many, starting with a general industry lack of support--DOS is still the preferred operating environment for building a rescue CD to help bring up a crippled system.

In the past year alone, I've had four near-fatal drive failures, each on a different system. To alleviate some of the pain associated with recovering from these kinds of problems, I've been working on building a self-contained, multiboot rescue CD that I can use to bring up a crippled system and perform emergency surgery.

This includes tasks such as repairing a broken partition table, cloning a failing drive to a new disk before the old one dies completely, or simply changing a corrupted file that is preventing the operating system from booting.

There are actually a number of options for building these kinds of things, depending on what you are trying to do. If you just want to fix up a Windows installation, you can use the Windows XP Recovery Console and a boot CD to bring a crippled system far enough along to do rudimentary repair work.

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